Environmental Management in the Context of Corporate Sustainability Concept

Abstract

Abstract The present age is marked by an unsustainable trends not only in the field of production but also in consumption, and concerns all levels of the community. At enterprise level, there is an effort to eliminate these negative trends by the application of several concepts in which environment and security are the essential parts. The paper focuses on environmental management as a significant part of the corporate sustainability concept and reports using of specific environmental tools to promote corporate sustainability. Apart from the tools, the paper also deals with motives that lead enterprises to focus on the environmental protection. The data were obtained through a questionnaire survey among Slovak manufacture enterprises. The focus of the research is transformed into several hypotheses. Several methods of inferential statistics (Interval estimate, Chi-square test, Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA, and Wilcoxon signed-rank test) were used to verify our hypotheses. In hypothesis testing we used .05 level of significance. Based on the descriptive statistics it is evident that 50% of the total number of enterprises (N = 336) use at least one of the environmental management tools. Their using depends on the origin of capital. The results also indicate the individual benefits of focusing on environmental management and underline their importance to the business world.