Multi-criteria analysis of EU paper-producing companies concerning emissions trading and economic aspects

Industrial firms in the EU have had to adapt over the past decades to face the increasing pressure of becoming more environmentally responsible. The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) has played a crucial role in this process, and its impact on participating firms is a matter of debate for researchers, corporate managers, and policy makers alike. Unfortunately, there are only a minimum of models that assess the impact of the EU ETS on individual firms, especially in the context of overall firm performance and dependencies on other (economic and social) factors. For the paper industry, such a study is completely lacking. The authors use the well-established framework of the CSR model and the DC-PROMETHEE method to explore the ranking of paper producing firms in the EU. DC-PROMETHEE considers the effect of the dependencies between criteria that can potentially distort the results. The study revealed that both the EU ETS itself and the links between the evaluating criteria have an impact on the final CSR ranking of the paper producing companies. • First CSR ranking model for EU paper firms, including environmental factors. • Multi-criteria decision model including the effect of EU ETS at company level. • CSR decision model considering criteria dependencies for unbiased evaluation.