ECOEFFICIENCY MEASUREMENT USING DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS: RESEARCH AND PRACTITIONER ISSUES

Ecoefficiency is critical for organisations that seek to be both environmentally conscious and profitable. Ecoefficiency has implications for a "win-win" situation to arise. Studying and managing organisations from this perspective requires an evaluation of ecoefficiency. To aid researchers and managers develop measures for ecoefficiency we review the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) for this purpose. DEA theory and application has increased greatly. Its use as a tool for environmental performance evaluation has been limited. In this paper we provide a number of DEA models and some extensions and how they can be utilised from both the practitioner and researcher perspective. An illustrative example from published data helps to gain insight into the various models, their capabilities and limitations.