Public concern for the environment has grown over the past 30 years in the United States; so has public desire to know what industries are doing to clean up (or not clean up) their act. Perhaps as many as 250 companies in the United States are issuing corporate annual environmental reports — some from as early as 1990 — and the number is growing steadily.
According to Douglas J. Lober, assistant professor of environmental management at Duke Univesity's Nicholas School of the Environment, more utility, forest/paper and chemical/petroleum companies are issuing annual environmental reports than are other industrial sectors. In a study published in January 1996 Lober reported that food, metals, metal products, computers, mining/crude-oil, airlines and motor vehicle (parts) industrial sectors were least likely to have issued an annual report..
It doesn't take a genius to understand that corporations will want to show their accomplishments and downplay their problems. Thus the reports usually contain a lot of positive information about what is being done to overcome pollution or enhance environmental quality. Subjects that fit this bill are reducing waste, preventing pollution, recycling materials, monitoring emissions and reducing environmental and health risks to employees and the public. All of these subjects can be and are presented in colorful bar and pie charts. Companies understandably want to show how the bad has decreased and the good has increased.
Companies are also likely to tell you about their corporate environmental policies, management structure and methods of communication of environmental information to employees and the public.
These reports are bound to have less information about negative things such as what has gone wrong (air, water, land pollution) or what has not been done (cleanup, beautification, noise reduction).
Some companies are beginning to include information that relates to global concerns such as global warming and sustainability, although the amount of this kind of information included in a report is so skimpy as to have little meaning.
Some skeptics will say that the self-serving, slanted nature of corporate reporting makes the reports meaningless. Others complain that there should be more information about fines, environmental incidents and lawsuits. Still others criticize the reports because they fail to link the cost of environmental performance with profits. And suspicious people will tell you, of course, that what companies say they do doesn't necessarily translate into what they actually do.
The reports are not meaningless. First, employees, the public and other audiences do get to see, in one place, information that might otherwise only be available piecemeal to a select few.
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