Concerns of the business manager in protecting environment

Protecting the environment is considered nowadays as a key issue affecting everyone. Business organizations are pressurized to ensure that the environment suffers minimum damage due to their processes, products and services.

Business organizations use recyclable materials, monitor pollution levels, and take various other measures to protect the environment and to comply with increasing customer demand for green products. The work of the business manager is changing so as to encompass environmental issues.

Businesses report information about their actions with regard to maintaining the environment in their annual financial report. This includes energy usage, level of toxic waste, noise, policies regarding environmental care etc. Although the annual report is traditionally a report of financial information about the organization, the users of it represent a wide audience. Therefore, businesses consider the annual report as a public relations document. As a result, businesses tend to report information regarding their products, policies etc. and now that has been extended to report information about their actions on preserving the environment.

However, the trend is still very slow and on a voluntary basis only. Therefore there is a danger that the information may be incomplete and unreliable. Some organizations make a policy statement and not more than that. Others make a policy statement and a statement on what actions they have taken to implement the policy. Some entities do not make any quantified statements. Others report physical measurements such as water pollution, emissions, and impact on disposal of products etc.

Green movement groups create a powerful force in demanding for environmental information from business organizations. Groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth make the public aware of environmental issues and force the organizations to care. International bodies like United Nations have addressed the issues but their proposals have been complex and impractical for implementation by the industrial sector as well as the bodies setting standards.

Regulations issued by governments and international bodies help to ensure increased actions for environmental care. Still there are no compulsory requirements to publish results of environmental audits. But some environmental bodies require the business organizations to publish a summary of figures on pollution, emissions, waste production, consumption of raw materials, energy, waste, noise etc.

When environmental regulations increase and demand from the public becomes more onerous, the businesses need to meet the cost of these actions. The actions that business organizations should take may include structural changes to the value chain or to the entire business model. All these mean cost or money. However, it is unrealistic to expect businesses to drop their profit making operations to save the Earth. Therefore, changes should be incremental and regulations should be ………… ………………  .

It is left to you to discuss further about the subject here.