Environmental issues in the food and beverage sector: A multivariate regional analysis

Abstract

Environmental issues have now become of primary concern for businesses and society alike. Indeed, many companies have been held to account for their negative impact on the environment rather than being appreciated for their technological and financial performance. It therefore stands to reason that companies are interested in proving to society that they are also concerned about environmental wellbeing, and to do so they are resorting to eco-reporting.

This disclosure involves the qualitative and quantitative data that measure, calculate, and estimate the environmental impact of a company's operations. At the same time, stakeholders are increasingly lobbying companies to make major efforts in eco-responsibility in the form of environmental reports, disclosing aspects related to the organisation's public image and its eco-related activities and aspirations.

This research analyses environmental reporting practices involving companies in the food & beverage sector across different countries and continents to identify possible differences and similarities between them. This provides us with a greater and more robust understanding of organisations and the environment in diverse institutional settings. The target population consists of companies in developed economies such as the USA, Australia, Canada, and the EU, and developing ones such as China, India, Brazil, and Mexico. To facilitate the interpretation of the results, the countries have been grouped by continents: Europe, Africa, Asia, America, and Oceania. Food & beverage is the sector of choice because it provides an essential service for people's sustenance and has attracted the attention of scholars in the fields of the environment and sustainability. Moreover, prior evidence shows that the food & beverage sector depends largely on natural resources, with a far-reaching impact on the environment. The methodology used involves multivariate techniques that enable us to analyse the joint behaviour of several variables and provide an insight into how the different environmental indicators perform, as they can be identified by countries and continents.

Beginning with the 19 environmental variables belonging to the dimension of resource use, the results obtained by applying logistic biplot reveal a significant increase over the entire period in question, with changes in priorities across these variables. Resource reduction policy (RRP) and policy energy efficiency (PEE) are the two most highly valued approaches by companies in the food & beverage sector. As regards the dimension of emissions, the trend has been similar to the one involving resource use, with significant growth over time and changes in the priorities of businesses in this sector, with their preferences being policy emissions (PE), waste reduction initiatives (WRI), and target emissions (TE). The highlights in the dimension of innovation involve the following group of variables that have become a corporate priority: product impact minimisation (PIM), organic product initiatives (OPI), product environmental responsible use (PERUse), and environmental products (EP).

The next step in this research has involved exploring the differences across continents by means of an X-STATIS analysis. Europe and America are the study's main focuses. In Europe, the companies with the highest commitment to innovation are France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland; the opposite may be said of Russia, with a weak commitment in this study. America focuses more on resource use and emissions, with most of the companies involved being located in the US.