Business and Environmental Protection

Protecting the environment is a serious issue facing business managers and decision-makers.

What the environment is: the environment is defined as the totality of a person's surroundings — both natural and man-made. These surroundings are also resources useful for human life:

• Natural resources — land, water, air, fauna and flora, and raw materials.
• Man-made resources — cultural heritage, socio-economic institutions, and the people themselves.

The problem of deteriorating quality: It is widely recognised that the quality of the environment is deteriorating fast, largely because of industrial activity. Around major cities such as Kanpur, Jaipur, Delhi, Panipat and Kolkata, industrial emissions are seriously affecting people's health.

Pollution: Pollution is the injection of harmful substances into the environment, and it is largely the result of industrial production. Because some waste is inevitable when materials and energy are used, manufacturers face the challenge of minimising the harmful impact of that waste through proper technologies.

• Pollution changes the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of air, land and water.
• It harms human life and the life of other species, degrades living conditions, and wastes or depletes raw-material resources.
• It affects the country's cultural heritage, making it increasingly hard to protect historical monuments.
• Pollution exists because the environment can absorb only a limited amount of pollutants and waste. Some hazardous wastes, toxic by-products and chemicals cannot be assimilated at all. …