Sustainability materiality matrices in doubt: may prioritizations of aspects overestimate environmental performance?

Abstract

This study builds on the research gap that arises from the consistency analysis of the GRI-materiality approach with other prioritization approaches. The main objective is to explore to what extent corporate environmental performance is consistent using two different prioritization approaches. This study employs a novel quantitative approach to assess environmental performance through the prioritization of environmental aspects by using companies’ materiality analysis and independent expert knowledge. The empirical analysis focuses on the environmental performance analysis of wearing apparel companies. The main findings reveal that companies with better environmental performance could be using materiality analysis to further embellish the positive performance or for greenwashing purposes. This study could serve as a starting point to improve understanding of how companies could identify, from an objective and comparable basis, those environmental aspects that are essential to their business strategy and that are necessary to help stakeholders to make fully informed decisions.

Keywords:

• environmental performance
• sustainability accounting
• sustainability reporting
• materiality analysis
• wearing apparel industry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1 As exceptions, Lai, Melloni, and Stacchezzini (2017) explore how the materiality principle is implemented in the Integrated Reporting, highlighting a clear strategic orientation and a significant role of the chief financial officer and Fasan and Mio (2017) identify the determinants of materiality disclosure based on the adoption of Integrated Reporting, concluding industry and some firm-level characteristics as significant factors.

2 In the prioritization of aspects, this study calculates an average by issue of the results obtained in the five dimensions.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 693642, project SMART (Sustainable Market Actors for Responsible Trade) and the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, Project “ECO-CIRCULAR” – Ref. ECO2016-74920-C2-1-R. In addition, this research was partially financed by Nils Science and Sustainability Programme (ES07), ABEL – Coordinated Mobility of Researchers (ABEL-CM-2014A), and supported by a grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA Financial Mechanism. Operated by Universidad Complutense de Madrid.