Environmental Impact Assessment As A Tool For Managing The Competitiveness Of Wood-Processing Enterprises

The wood-processing industry retains a pronounced export orientation, while European integration and tightening environmental regulation increasingly turn ecological performance into a determinant of market access; conventional competitiveness management, however, insufficiently incorporates environmental factors, and the results of the mandatory environmental impact assessment procedure usually remain within permitting workflows rather than informing managerial decisions. The study aims to develop an algorithm for applying environmental impact assessment results in the competitiveness management of wood-processing enterprises and to formalise it through an integral indicator of environmental competitiveness. Methodology. The research relies on systematisation of the industry’s environmental aspects, normalisation of heterogeneous indicators, their additive convolution into an integral indicator with expert weighting coefficients, and ecological-economic verification of the decision. Results. A six-step algorithm with a feedback loop is developed, and an integral indicator formed from four normalised sub-indices – resource and energy efficiency, environmental safety of production, circularity, and market environmental compliance – is proposed together with a three-level interpretation scale of a recommendatory nature. Originality. Unlike existing descriptive approaches, the proposed algorithm combines a formalised comparison of technological alternatives with a feedback loop and a quantitative environmental competitiveness indicator. Practical implications. The approach is applicable for justifying environmental and technological decisions; in a conditional example, the transition to water-based coatings raised the integral indicator from 0.522 to 0.903 with an estimated payback period of about two years.