Corporate Environmental Strategy最新文献

Physicist John Wheeler once commented that, “we shape the world by the questions we ask.” By asking better questions about how we can more efficiently produce our nation's goods and services, environmental leadership no longer means ratcheting down the economy. Rather, it becomes more an issue of how we can put our technological know-how and leadership to work. When we think about encouraging more investment in more productive technologies, we are taking the first step that will both save money and reduce environmental impacts. And it appears that more businesses are beginning to ask those tougher and better questions. The remaining question is whether we can sufficiently increase the number of businesses who are willing to ask those harder questions, and who are willing to explore new ways to turn missed opportunities into real world savings – to the benefit of the environment. Paraphrasing the great English economist, John Maynard Keynes, “the difficulty lies not with the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones.”

As with quality and innovation, sustainability must be supported by all employees. Sustainability requires a multi-level, multidisciplinary approach to the development of new products, reviews of existing products and processes, and efforts to help customers address environmental issues. 3M's Environmental, Health and Safety Management System – which follows principles of Life Cycle Management – is the company's primary tool for promoting sustainability. Leadership, communications and adequate resources are also needed if sustainability is to become rooted in a company's activities. 3M's Pollution Prevention Pays (3P) program, founded in 1975, provides an example of how these factors support sustainability. 3P, which seeks to eliminate pollution before it occurs, has spawned more than 4,750 projects worldwide, all of them proposed by employees. These projects have prevented the generation of 1.7 billion pounds of pollution and reduced costs by $850 million in the first year of implementation. 3P works because it encourages employees to use their first-hand knowledge of products and processes and then recognizes their efforts.

The costs and benefits of ISO 14001 certification result in firms choosing this route as a tool for proactive environmental management, according to a survey of 131 companies across the world. The following paper examines the motivation to pursue ISO 14001 certification for companies in developed and developing countries. While the costs of ISO 14001 certification vary widely, almost all respondents report substantial cost savings as a result of implementation. This was especially the case in developing countries, where enthusiasm about the standard (among certified firms) is very high. Contrary to the concerns voiced by skeptics, many firms stated that they decided to implement an ISO 14001 in order to “be a good neighbor” and to raise their employee's level of environmental awareness. Surprisingly, very few respondents stated that their primary motivations for implementation were profit-related. The majority of firms appear to be using ISO 14001 as a tool for proactive environmental management, as its creators intended.

This paper¹ examines the issue of sustainability in the internal operations of companies. It examines what sustainability means in the business context, looks at how the concept can be measured with an example applied to companies in Brazil and examines the economics of corporate sustainability. It briefly explores the business case and raises a number of issues and questions that need to be discussed further. The paper ends with a suggested memo of concrete actions that a forward looking CEO could write to the company's senior managers.

The track record of the past decade shows that sustainability has had a difficult time getting traction inside corporations. In large measure, this is because it is a fuzzy and unproven concept – business executives require clarity to move forward. One way around this hurdle is by focusing on safety, which can provide an effective platform for helping companies make the transition to sustainability. In many ways, the two concepts are quite similar. Both are about increasing the prospects for human health and happiness. Yet, unlike sustainability, safety is well understood and actionable, and it is also an increasingly high priority in our post-9-11 era. A focus on safety provides senior executives a path up a Safety-Sustainability Continuum that starts with the workplace and proceeds to traditional functional business areas such as safer R&D and correspondingly products. Ultimately this leads to activities that are intended not only to reduce a company's negative “footprint” (for instance, by making products less toxic) but by expanding their positive “footprint”, (e.g. by pursuing ecosystem restoration and regeneration). Ideally, a campaign to use safety as an entry point for operationalizing sustainability will have a dual emphasis, focusing equally on the human benefits of safety and the business case for pursuing safety (and, ultimately, sustainability).

Environmental problems in the United States often are marked by adversarial relationships between businesses and government. Adversarial decision-making creates delays and often fails to achieve satisfactory results. Cooperative relationships might enable businesses and governments to better solve pressing environmental problems. In many instances, governments and businesses could achieve “win–win” environmental solutions that were good for the environment and economy. Though people in government and business endorse these approaches, efforts to put such principles into practice have proved difficult. This paper reviews the movement toward greater cooperation in environmental decision-making, showing both advances that have taken place and limits to further progress.