Environmental Management Practices of an Apparel Manufacturer in Sri Lanka: A Critique

Abstract

Environmental degradation considered as one of the critical issues in the current world. To respond to this issue, organizations and businesses around the world seriously focus on environmental protection and management nowadays than before. Organizations strongly committed to adapt several sustainable environmental management practices and initiatives to prove their environmental concern. Meanwhile, it should be noticed that some organizations started pacing towards green washing declaration processes. In this sense, there is a need to explore and identify the sustainable environmental management practices which are actually practiced by the organizations. Hence, this paper aims to report existing sustainable environmental management practices of the organization and to find out the evidence to support the existing sustainable environmental management practices into practice. In order to achieve the study objectives, secondary data were collected mainly from the published sustainability reports of the selected apparel company for the last two years (2013/2014 and 2014/2015). Further, researchers employed the observation method to confirm whether this company is really carrying out the environmental practices which were reported in their sustainability reports or not. The researchers have identified and highlighted several sustainable environmental management practices under the three main categories such as energy conservation-related practices, water conservation-related practices and earth conservation-related practices through the sustainability reports of the company. Moreover, through the observation, researchers have confirmed that this company is really carrying out the energy conservation-related practices, water conservation-related practices and earth conservation-related practices which were reported in their sustainability reports. This study should be useful to the academics and practitioners to understand actual sustainable environmental management practices of the organizations.