As energy prices increase, industries are more and more aware that energy is an expensive commodity that has to be used efficiently in order to reduce the costs that it entails. When companies realized that improving energy efficiency was not only about energy performance, but also about the business performance as a whole, i.e. about improving profits, the motivation for energy eco management became evident.
However, the improvement of environmental groups performance is associated with costly measures and interventions without obvious and immediate financial benefit to a company; hence for years improvement of environmental performance has not been high on the agenda. Therefore, the introduction of environmental legislation is necessary in order to enforce minimum standards of environmental performance.
Increasingly, over the last decade, companies themselves are recognizing that care for the environment and sustainable development are part of good corporate behavior, which besides having obvious benefits for the global environment that we all share, also brings with it the ‘goodwill’ benefit of environmentally conscious customers that prefer to buy goods and service from companies that employ so-called ‘green’ business practices.
Major international corporations are subscribing voluntarily nowadays to schemes like the Global Reporting Initiative, Business Roundtable Principles of Corporate Governance, Corporate Sustainability, and the US Climate Action Partnership.
