Engagement & Disclosure

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Facility Reporting Project (FRP)

About FRP

In 2003, Ceres and the Tellus Institute launched the Facility Reporting Project (FRP) as a multi-stakeholder effort to develop consistent, comparable, and credible economic, environmental and social reporting guidance for individual facilities in the United States. Major initial funding was provided by the Joyce Foundation of Chicago. Additional funding has been provided by the Multi-State Working Group on Environmental Performance and the U.S. EPA.

About facility-level reporting

Organization-level sustainability reporting is becoming a basic expectation for larger corporations and institutions. Facility reporting is a complement to organization-level reporting, providing significant benefits to society, the larger organization and the individual facility. The FRP has developed Sustainability Reporting Guidance in order to strengthen facility accountability to the public and other facility stakeholders by enabling them to report their economic, environmental and social performance to the public in a credible, comparable and consistent manner.

About the FRP Guidance

Developed in 2004, our reporting guidance is a tool to support facilities (and their parent organizations) in voluntary, public reporting of facility-level sustainability performance information. It consists of indicators (or metrics) for use in reporting sustainability performance and guidance to assist in the reporting process. We hope this reporting framework will help organizations and institutions improve their performance at the facility level.

Click here to download the FRP Guidance (PDF).

Relationship with the Global Reporting Initiative

The FRP Reporting Guidance was developed in consultation with the Global Reporting Initiative's (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Guidelines for organization-level reporting, which is emerging as the generally accepted sustainability reporting standard. The GRI Guidelines provide the best "compatibility standard" for facility level reporting, although it is important to note that facility reporting and organization-level reporting have important differences. The FRP Reporting Guidance has been developed to accommodate those differences.

Pilot Program: 2005-2006

In 2005-2006, 14 facilities in 12 U.S. states and the Dominican Republic pilot-tested the FRP Sustainability Reporting Guidance. The primary product of the pilot test experience is a publicly available facility-level sustainability report providing baseline performance information for key performance indicators. Participating facilities and links to their reports are listed below:

FRP Next Steps

Building on the success of last year’s initial round of pilot testing, Ceres’ Facility Reporting Project (FRP) is expanding. Six new facilities and three second-time reporting facilities, including ones operated by Xanterra and Xerox, will produce local-level sustainability reports demonstrating how FRP can help companies integrate sustainability throughout their operations and communities of impact.

Benefits of producing a facility-level report

Ceres' FRP team provided training and guidance for facilities' internal team management, data collection and methodology, and external stakeholder engagement. Pilot participants have worked with stakeholders to determine key performance indicators and publish local-level sustainability reports.

Each pilot tester has attained at least some (if not all) of the following additional benefits from participation:

  • Improved level of dialogue, enhanced reputation with key stakeholder groups
  • Increased employee understanding of and commitment to environmental policies and programs
  • New approaches risk reduction associated with environmental, social, and economic performance
  • External value gained from using environmental management systems for reporting
  • Future cost savings from improvement of internal management systems

Read the Inside Green Business article that features the results of the FRP pilot test. (PDF)

Support for the Facility Reporting Project

"The facility reporting project will provide a way to track employee dedication, manufacturing quality and collaboration in the plants and in the communities. The process can also provide information for better analysis of brownfield redevelopment. The people of Ford need to be continuous responsible members of the communities in which we operate. This will be of great help."
David Berdish- Corporate Governance Manager, Ford Motor Company

"The FRP may serve as a catalyst for an important national dialogue of Federal facility communication with stakeholders."
John Coho- Department of Defense

"The Facility Reporting Project is a relately easy thing to ask of a facility. Any corporation that engages in sustainability reporting almost always already collects facility-level data and then uses that information to roll up to its corporate level report. For this reason, the concept, data, and indicators that the FRP asks of facility level reporting will be rather easy to obtain."
Jeff Hogue- Genencor

"The FRP is a tool for a more detailed level of environmental reporting that includes practical guidance for implementation. Companies that understand the business case for improving their reporting and stakeholder engagement are those likely to adopt the FRP as a model for attaining these goals."
Ken Sutherland- EHS&S Audit Manager, Hewlett-Packard

Contact

Beth Ginsberg Holzman
Manager, Corporate Accountability Program
617-247-0700 ext 21
holzman@ceres.org