Preserving the ecosystem is a global responsibility. Rapid environmental changes have caused a widely changing attitude on the part of individuals, corporations, and governments. Individual actions have repercussion at a global level, which is why protecting the ecosystem should be a global goal. Environmental issues have increasingly become an important public policy goal and environmental sustainability and energy efficiency challenge modern companies.

Corporate environmental management information systems (CEMIS) play a major role in speeding up that change in attitude by providing information that allows users to assess the current environmental impact of their processes and operations.

Acquiring environmental information is often expensive and time-consuming (Jamous, et al., 2010). After having reviewed some CEMIS, it becomes obvious that none of these tools targets the growing need of the SMEs for such systems, although a study presented by Lukacs shows that 93 % of European enterprises have less than 10 employees (Lukacs, 2005). Some of the problems that SMEs have to face include the price of the tool, the fact that SMEs have to buy the whole system package although they might only need a few of its components, the demand for expensive hardware, huge efforts for customization, conditioning, and maintenance, and the need to hire expensive experts for operating the system.

The challenge is to find a cost-effective solution that takes into consideration not only the size and type of an organization, but also its needs and priorities.
The main goal of LWC-EPI is to provide an efficient environmental management information system model, which can help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to select, create, calculate, compare, and report its environmental performance indicators (EPIs) on the enterprise level.