Competitive Advantages Through Voluntary Environmental Reporting

Abstract

Today it is not only environmental pressure groups that seek greater transparency in matters of pollution caused by companies and their products, and about measures taken to reduce or avoid it. It is also the companies’ own employees, customers and neighbours that increasingly demand more environmental information. Active communication about environmental issues has grown considerably in importance in recent years - shown not least by the fact that so far more than 1800 German firms have published a free standing environmental report. About 1500 of these reports are environmental statements of production sites that participate in the Environmental Management and Audit System (EMAS) of the European Communities.On a global scale the number of companies or production sites with free standing environmental reports is estimated by the Berlin-based Ecological Economics Research Institute IÖW to amount to about 2500.