<p>Different economic and social actors pressure firms to undertake initiatives to protect the natural environment and minimize their negative impacts on society. In turn, firms have responded to these pressures, incorporating a variety of sustainability practices. The literature has put emphasis on examining the proactive and regulatory-driven motives behind firms’ decisions to adopt sustainability management practices. It concludes with various typologies that classify firms into categories. Although the nature of such classifications has great merit for scholars and practitioners, there are drawbacks that can play a critical role in the decision of stakeholders. To enhance the effectiveness and reliability of such typologies, this paper develops a typology matrix to classify firms into four behavior types, namely reactive, proactive, innovative, and progressive, based on various sustainability criteria. It is based on scoring measurement systems to extract quantitative information from corporate social responsibility reports. The proposed methodology was applied to a sample of the top 25 chemical firms according to their sales. The findings show that the majority of the examined firms were classified as reactive and only four firms were classified as progressive, which indicates that the sampled firms adopted a passive approach toward the implementation of sustainability practices.</p> Graphical abstract <p></p>