The Environment Agency on Tuesday released a draft for overhauling its environmental reporting guidelines to help a growing number of corporations publish their environmental reports under a standardized format.
Environmental reports cover the extent to which companies worked to resolve or diminish the effects of their industrial waste as well as their environmental conservation efforts.
The revision comes three years after the guidelines were first completed and amid growing interest in environmental reporting on the part of corporations -- the number of which publishing environmental reports jumped from 170 in 1997 to 270 in 1999, according to agency officials.
The original guidelines were criticized by some as being simply a collection of examples.
The new guidelines outline 17 categories that firms should include in their reports, including a message from top management, progress on environment management programs and steps to minimize energy consumption and waste production.
The guidelines are also designed to be compatible with and include environmental accounting and an environmental performance index -- standardized formats of which are being put together by the agency.
The guidelines will target the roughly 6,200 large-scale companies that are either listed firms or have over 500 employees, officials said.
The agency will accept comments on the draft, available on the agency's home page, for one month. A finalized version is to be released by the end of the year and sent to large companies and other interested groups.