Statistics Sweden conducts data collection in accordance to the Eurostat manual ”The Environmental goods and services sector – A data collection handbook” (2009). The manual was developed between 2005 and 2009 and Statistics Sweden actively took part in this work. One change in the new manual, compared to the earlier manual, is that the environmental area “Drinking water” (NACE code 41 in its 2002 version) has been removed.
Methodology behind environmental sector statistics
Since 2000 Statistics Sweden has developed a database consisting of establishments active in the environmental sector. The population is based on establishments and there were around 15 000 establishments in the population in 2010. A company can be made up of one or many establishments. In the database each establishment is classified according to its environmental area as well as the environmental share which is based on its environmental activity.
There are environmental establishments in most of the industries (NACE). Information about each establishment’s NACE code is found in the Business Database at Statistics Sweden. A selection of NACE codes is included in its entity and these are NACE 2211, 37, 38, 39 and 4677. (NACE Rev 2 2007). In order to locate establishments outside of these NACE codes, a number of sources are used. For example are the Energy statistics at Statistics Sweden, different industry organisations and Eniro web search used.
Comparable between the years
In earlier years it has been difficult to interpret the differences between the years, since we continuously include new establishments in the database in order to improve the quality. To maintain comparability between years, the time-series is revised backwards each year, back to 2003.