The Environmental Protection Agency of Mexico (PROFEPA) has released its first report rating thousands of the county’s companies on three environmental performance indices. For the last five years PROFEPA has collected data on 6,048 Mexican companies’ air emissions, generation of solid wastes, and hazardous wastes.
In this first release regarding their findings, the agency reports that on a scale from one to 100, on average Mexican companies score just 51.4 on air pollution, 52 on hazardous waste and 60 on solid/infectious waste production. The petroleum industry scored the poorest using PROFEPA’s scale, with Pemex, the nation’s giant oil monopoly receiving a miserable 11.2 for its emissions. The pharmaceutical industry received the best scores as a whole, followed by the paper industry, automobile manufacturers and the textile industry. While the average overall scores of Mexican companies are mediocre by the agency’s own admission,
PROFEPA said it did not include in the survey those corporations that have already voluntarily joined the country’s national environmental auditing program. By virtue of inclusion in that program many companies would score high on PROFEPA’s scale, meeting or exceeding Mexico’s pollution and hazardous waste emissions standards. PROFEPA also said that only a small percentage of the surveyed companies would have difficulty improving their environmental performance, because many of the infractions leading to lowered scores were of a reporting and administrative nature rather than procedural.
