Corporate Environmental Strategies Towards Sustainable Development

Abstract

Many companies have adopted some form of environmental programme to manage their relationship with nature. However, a company's environmental achievements tend to be disconnected from its general operations; consequently, these achievements are ineffective. The purpose of this article is to employ a conceptual approach to explore ways to compose effective corporate environmental strategies. From a resource perspective, the flow of material, knowledge and experiences, relationships, communication, and cooperation and control are discussed as strategy aspects central to an effective environmental strategy. Using these five strategy aspects we show how three different strategies with different contents and directions can be assembled. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Environmental responsibility in hospital care: Findings from a qualitative study

“…The wider topic of environmental responsibility should be included in nursing and medical curriculums to help health care professionals to understand the connection between their practices, resource scarcity and climate change. [2,45,46] Information needs to be up-to-date, [16] usable, interesting, reasonable and easy to understand. This relates to both formal and in-service training.…”

“…In addition to receiving education, people also need to be motivated to behave in an environmentally friendly way [14] by other approaches. [16] Administrators could, for example, give work communities feedback on their performance [29] and reward their success financially [43,47] and publicly. Also, a sense of community motivates people to act pro-environmentally, [48] particularly if it benefits their private life.…”

“…[2,9,14] Indeed, environmental responsibility refers to people's behavior, [3,4] but it also includes the actions taken by organizations to protect the world around them. [4,[15][16][17] Environmental responsibility is also an important part of occupational wellbeing, as chemical control protects workers' health. [11,18,19] Health care has been identified as a "highhazard" work sector because of the pharmaceuticals involved, such as anticancer drugs, sterilizing substances, and other substances used in various forms by its employees.…”

“…[20][21][22][23] Long-term strategic policies are required to promote environmental responsibility at an organizational level. [16,17] An environmental program is a strategic organizational policy paper, led by the hospital's senior management team, that defines the framework for systematically providing services without harming the environment. [17] However, it has been reported that the use of these programs is not approached systematically in the hospital sector.…”

“…[20,23,30] In contrast, very few studies have looked at comprehensive environmental responsibility in hospital organizations [9] and have merely referred to structural skeletons that promote ecologically sustainable patient care. [9,16,17] Therefore this topic had been chosen as the main focus in this study, which aims to identify the key elements of environmental responsibility in hospital care and the stakeholders involved. We conducted this research using information from environmental managers and programs in Finnish university hospitals.…”