ABSTRACT
Sustainable development not only means viable economic growth, but all aspects of sustainability, including the environment. With this phenomenon, global corporate leaders have carved an important niche—in promoting global environmental management practices, not only for their own facilities, but often for the industrial sectors in which they operate, including their horizontal and vertical partners, vendors and suppliers. Based on an increasing number of private, market-based initiatives, the United States Asia Environmental Partnership developed the 'Clean Technology and Environmental Management' (CTEM) programme. In a study initiated and sponsored by the CTEM programme, environmental managers and directors at thirty multinational corporations, all Fortune 500 companies, were interviewed to identify their corporate environmental strategies and how these strategies effect corporate practice and performance. The chapter presents a study which focuses on voluntary environmental practices of companies: that is the activities that the corporations believe take them beyond compliance into a new level of commitment and consciousness about their own environmental performance.
