Strategic Environmental Management

"Strategic environmental management" enhances performance by providing today's goods and services without hurting tomorrow's customers. Because it conserves and safeguards natural resources, strategic environmental management is compatible with "sustainable development": meeting the needs of today while preserving our descendants' ability to meet the needs of the future. It recognizes that economic growth and environmental preservation must go hand in hand.

Strategic environmental management means thinking about the profit opportunities in sustainable business practices. One avenue is reducing costly waste streams. Waste-- unused byproducts or inputs-- is costly in terms of materials usage and disposal. In industry after industry, companies are cutting these costs. Another avenue of strategic environmental management is reinventing products and processes for the future marketplace. The public's growing environmental concerns mean that business and household customers want products that are made and usable in environmentally friendly ways. Companies able to meet some piece of this demand will be tomorrow's front-runners.

What both approaches have in common is moving beyond compliance. Today's regulations are often easily met and exceeded as a result of strategic environmental management, whose primary focus is—of course!—the bottom line.

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