Research On Evaluating For Environment Performance Of Mining Companies

Environment problems have been highlighted and intensified as a result of therapid economic development worldwide since the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury. The Chinese government attaches great importance to energy saving andenvironmental protection. Mining industry as the hardest hit of environmentalprotection, especially the Zijin Mining Group event that the keto acid water leakageincident occurred in2010, resulting in a wide range of severe water pollution, broughtenvironmental issues onto the environment topic list and caused widespread concernthroughout the whole country. The state pays great attention on environmental lawsand regulations, and continues to strengthen the government’s efforts on adjusting theeconomic structures. The Third Plenum of eighteen "decision on deepening the reformof the overall number of major issues" attaches great importance on environmentalproblems and explores to make up the natural resources balance sheet to specialize thesupervision of environmental issues. But regulations alone cannot solve the problemsof corporate weak environmental awareness. Environmental management from abusiness perspective must be strengthened. Supervision from the government and thepublic enhances the company’s environmental awareness, taking environmentalfactors into consideration in strategic management and daily operation. How toevaluate the company’s environmental management activities becomes an importantproblem in the environmental field. Relevant standards have been put forward bydifferent countries and institutions, but there is no specification of the currentuniversal evaluation criteria.Based on this, it is extremely essential to propose the suggestion of improvingthe environmental performance evaluation. This paper is meant to specially study theenvironmental performance evaluation of mining companies and put forward feasiblesuggestions to improve the level of environmental performance of mining companieson the basis of empirical analysis. Beginning with the background and significance ofcorporate environmental performance evaluation, the paper expounds the current importance and necessity of environmental performance evaluation of China’s miningenterprises. Next is the concept of the environmental performance and environmentalperformance evaluation and the summary of the current study of domestic andinternational research literature on environmental performance evaluation and criteriaput forward by major countries and institutions scholars. Considering currentenvironmental characteristics of the mining companies, with the introduction of theBalanced Scorecard principles, the paper builds the evaluation system including itemsof the financial dimension from the environment, the internal dimensions ofenvironmental management processes, stakeholder dimensions and dimensions ofinnovation and learning. Lastly, considering the current condition of corporateenvironmental information disclosure, this paper selects Lu’an Environmental Groupconsidering its adequate amount of information data for nearly three years, using AHPEvaluation Model to achieve comprehensive evaluation of quantitative and qualitativeenvironmental performance evaluation, striving to achieve scientific and operationalevaluation and providing advice and reference for our mining companies to assessenvironmental performance.