ABSTRACT
We begin this section with a look at how businesses have attempted to reduce their environmental risks by adopting their own environmental policy statements. Before the advent of ISO 14000, proactive companies were creating their own policy statements for a number of reasons. An environmental policy, if implemented effectively, can lessen a business’s impact on the environment and reduce legal and environmental risks proportional to the degree of commitment by senior management to achieving the goals and accomplishing the objectives of the policy. Direct benefits include improvement in the quality of life for employees and neighbors, upgrading of industry standards, and preservation of the ecosystem. Environmental policy statements have been around much longer than ISO 14000. Therefore, it is useful to examine what caused companies to produce these statements, what are their contents, and how they are implemented to understand how risks can be reduced in the context of making improvements to environmental performance.
