ABSTRACT
Firms' size and profitability may enable firms to invest in environmental compliance measures and create serious problems for the enforcement of environmental crimes. This chapter explores how very large and profitable firms deal with environmental compliance by presenting a case study in two highly visible, environmentally important, capital-intensive and scrutinised industries in the Netherlands: the waste industry and the chemical industry. Using data on ten firms in these industries it analyses the financial revenues of these firms, how these firms can be characterised in terms of their responsivity towards compliance with the law, and the ways in which environmental violations have been dealt with. The chapter discusses the existing literature on what has been conceptualised as the economic licence of business firms. It describes the results of a qualitative case study of ten companies in the waste and chemical industry in the Netherlands designed to explore how profitable these firms really are and how these companies deal with environmental compliance.
