Green new world: A corporate environmental business perspective

Interest in the relationship between business and the environment has grown significantly during the second half of the 1980s. During the 1970s and at the start of the 1980s environmental concern was mainly confined to a narrow group of environmental and political extremists. This is no longer true, however. With leading newspapers, journals, professional associations, etc., devoting more and more attention to this important relationship, the issue of environmental concern now increasingly finds its way into the boardrooms of a growing number of corporations. This paper discusses the concept of sustainable development and attempts to place it in a corporate context, not in the form of the "ten golden rules of industrial sustainability" but in an analysis and subsequent discussion of the way mainstream economists have handled the environment to date. Special attention is given to the interdependence between Corporate Strategic Environmental and Resource Management and Total Quality Management, and, in addition, to the importance of the measuring and controlling of environmental and resource management. Due to the fact that there appears to be only very limited industrial "greening" experiences in Scandinavia, this article closes with with an outline of the present situation in Denmark where this situation is beginning to change.