Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
solutions. The commercial benefits of environmental management are considered in
the following section.
Commercial benefits of environmental management
In order to encourage businesses to rise to the challenge of compensating for growth,
many commentators point to the range of commercial benefits that can accrue from
the preventative approaches to environmental protection that underpin productivity
gains. In particular, researchers have highlighted the following direct commercial
benefits:
•
reduced costs of raw materials and energy;
•
potential to exploit new market possibilities (due to new or improved products);
•
reduced costs of pollution abatement and waste disposal.
Indirect commercial benefits include:
•
improved relationship with regulators, given regulatory compliance;
•
public relations benefits associated with improved corporate citizenship;
•
maximized capacity for growth by reducing environmental constraints.
These commercial advantages and environmental benefits arising from increased
resource productivity - namely, reduced rates of resource depletion and levels of pol-
lution - have prompted researchers to emphasize the environment-business 'win-win'
potential of preventative approaches to environmental protection. This, in turn, has
encouraged government officials, planners, academics and business people across the
world to take up the challenge of Factor Four and even Factor Ten levels of environ-
mental improvement.
1
E
NVIRONMENTAL
MANAGEMENT
:
A
ROLE
IN
COMPENSATING
FOR
GROWTH
The increasing impetus behind the compensation for growth arguments is reflected
in the changing business agendas in boardrooms around the world. The aviation
industry is no exception. In a recent survey of the airline sector commissioned by the
International Air Transport Association (IATA) and undertaken by researchers in
ARIC at Manchester Metropolitan University (Dobbie and Hooper, 2001), com-
pany representatives were found to rate the importance of a range of social and envi-
ronmental issues on a par with commercial issues (such as improving airline ticket-
sales distribution networks, building new alliances and increasing the number of
links from the home airport). Significantly, average importance ratings were highest
for those environmental issues associated with direct impacts (eg noise, water pollu-
tion and emissions from aircraft) or the most obvious commercial and environmen-
tal 'win-win' situations (eg fuel and energy efficiency) (for more detail, see
Dobbie
and Hooper, 2001). That said, it is one thing to acknowledge the importance of
improving eco-efficiencies and quite another to achieve that goal.
