Environmental management is becoming fundamental to business and product strategy in a significant proportion of leading firms in both service and non-service industries. The increasing influence of environment in business is due to:
- Rapidly emerging environmental markets
- The public availability of environmental data
- Changed customer expectations of product and industry environmental performance
- The dawning realization that improving environmental performance provides many of the same productivity gains that focusing on eliminating defects does in manufacturing.
Environmental considerations not only affects the end of firm operations but is also central in marketing, distribution, manufacturing, product development, supplier and customer relations, and profitability - core areas of corporate strategic concern.