Characterization of the adoption of environmental management practices in large Brazilian companies

• We characterized groups of Brazilian companies by their environmental practices.
• Groups of the largest industrial companies had the best environmental performance.
• Cluster analysis allowed grouping companies with similar environmental practices.
• Resource consumption and waste treatment practices were the best performing.

Many studies in literature discuss the drivers to implementing environmental management systems and some of them appraise the characteristics of companies that are implementing these systems and related practices. The goal of this paper is to characterize groups of Brazilian companies with similarities in terms of their adopted environmental management practices. To achieve this objective, a cluster analysis was applied to identify and characterize groups of companies with similar environmental management practices. The practices considered for clustering were: organization of environmental management, adopted procedures, information policy, consumption of natural resources, waste treatment, and additional environmental actions (those not classified in the previous categories). Overall results showed that companies with the best environmental performance belong to the group of largest companies and most of them are in the industrial sector. Environmental practices with the best performance in this group comprised the consumption of natural resources and waste treatment. The environmental practices with the worst performance in all groups were in the additional environmental actions category, comprising the use of renewable energy sources, the development of projects to obtain carbon credits, and the adoption of Green Seal certification for neutralizing carbon.