Environmental disclosure analysis of sustainability reports the brazilian and international brewing industry based on Global Reporting Initiative - GRI

Erika Sucena,Marcia Mara De Oliveira Marinho

doi:10.1590/0104-530x3120

Erika Sucena, Marcia Mara De Oliveira Marinho

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1590/0104-530x3120

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Journal: Gestão & Produção	Publication Date: Jan 1, 2019
Citations: 3	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Universidade Federal da Bahia

Abstract

Abstract Environmental disclosure is a tool set that companies use to communicate their environmental performance to stakeholders. The organization Sustainability Report is the main platform to report the company's relationship with the environment in which operates. The Global Reporting Initiative- GRI is a scheme that develops and disseminates guidelines for this kind of account, to standardize and promote international report classification. The brewing industry is actively involved in the Brazilian economy, being a consumer of natural resources in great amounts. Thus, the objective of this article is to evaluate the level of environmental disclosure practiced in the sustainability reports of Brazilian brewering industries. The sample is characterized by the Sustainability Reports of the years 2011 to 2013 of the Brazilian companies: Ambev; Brazil Kirin; Grupo Petrópolis and internationals, Heineken; AB InBev; SABMiller and Heineken Netherlands. It was used four research techniques to analyse the reports: (1) Classification of indicators as the answer; (2) Adherence to treatment or GAPIE-GRI; (3) Effective Disclosure Degree and (4) indicators ranking the contents. Based on the obtained data, it can be concluded that the environmental information disclosure in the Sustainability Reports of the brewering industry, both national and international, has flaws such as: a) low disclosure GRI indicators with full adherence; b) lack of external verification of the documents; c) lack of financial correlation of environmental indicators; d) low quality provided information and e) lack of measurement information.

Highlights

With the growing companies concern about the environment that they are involved with, full disclose about their actions to the organization’s stakeholders is needed, in order to inform the measures adopted by the company to manage its environmental impacts and consumption of natural resources
The sector has an important participation in the country economy, contributing significantly with the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and communicating directly with several economy areas, through the consumption of goods and transportation of products (FGV, 2008)
All the analysis data was obtained from the Sustainability Reports contents publicly available by the companies through their websites, with a chronological cut from 2011 to 2013

Summary

Introduction

With the growing companies concern about the environment that they are involved with, full disclose about their actions to the organization’s stakeholders is needed, in order to inform the measures adopted by the company to manage its environmental impacts and consumption of natural resources.The Sustainability Report is the main communication tool for the company environmental issues, summarizing the actions and reactions of the company towards the environment and its environmental performance (Trieweiller et al, 2012).The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is an international non-governmental organization, with the mission to promote the standardization and international classification of organizational reports, publishing guidelines for this type of report (GRI, 2013).The Brazilian brewing sector is a differentiated oligopoly, composed of few but large companies (Borges & Souza, 2009). With the growing companies concern about the environment that they are involved with, full disclose about their actions to the organization’s stakeholders is needed, in order to inform the measures adopted by the company to manage its environmental impacts and consumption of natural resources. The Sustainability Report is the main communication tool for the company environmental issues, summarizing the actions and reactions of the company towards the environment and its environmental performance (Trieweiller et al, 2012). Breweries are highly demanding natural resources, especially water, and energy consumption, raw materials, caustic soda, the generation of solid by-products, recyclable waste, industrial effluents and CO2 emissions (Santos & Ribeiro, 2005; Pereira & Lima, 2013; Borges & Souza, 2009; Vieira, 2014)

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