Part 6: Duties to the Environment
89 What are the “take home” messages from this Part?
This Part covered a wide range of legal, economic, ethical, reporting, and practical aspects of sustainability.
Sustainability is an immense area of business concern, and this Part has only highlighted several of these areas. These include:
- The economic principles that make protecting the environment difficult, such as externalities and commons problems.
- Because of these difficulties, environmental is an area of significant legal regulation, including various federal laws designed to protect water and air.
- Reporting on environmental issues may be done through a variety of frameworks, such as GRI and SASB reporting.
- “Greenwashing” is a term for when companies attempt to create the image of sustainability without actually doing so.
- Losing a “social license to operate” occurs when a community, often over environmental issues, crosses a SRT and begins to retaliate against a company.
- Circular economies occur when companies prevent products from moving from production, to use, to waste.
Exercises
- For the company you have been considering in these exercises, consider how they might categorize the environment as a stakeholder. Find their GRI or SASB reports, if any. Comment on what you learn. Then, discuss how the company operates in terms of the circular economy.
