Innovative environmental management tools for the agri-food chain

Agri-food firms, as enterprises in any other sector, have a series of tools at their disposition, based on international standards, which may be useful for the pur-poses of environmental management. System standards (such as ISO 14001 for Environmental Management Systems) are the most widely used, but a more suit-able approach to environmental quality management in the agricultural and agri-food sectors is probably one based on using direct means of ensuring the environ-mental performance of products. In this chapter, new approaches centred on the product-orientation of environ-mental management systems are presented, also investigating their role in the im-provement of economic and competitive performance. Finally, the path towards the definition of a Product-Orientation of Environmental Management Systems (POEMS) framework, specifically tailored to companies operating in the agribusi-ness sector, is described.