Environmental impact management of Brazilian companies: analyzing factors that influence disclosure of waste, emissions, effluents, and other impacts

In an effort to understand the environmental disclosure mechanism from a business perspective, this article aims to identify the factors that influence environmental disclosure of Brazilian companies listed on the stock exchange. To achieve this goal, the annual and sustainability reports were observed from 50 Brazilian companies, during the period 2009-2011. First, the level of disclosure was measured for waste, emissions, effluents, and other impacts for each company, and the model to measure the disclosure level was constructed from a literature review and guidelines from the Global Reporting Initiative. After measuring the disclosure level, factors that explain what is reported by companies, which are used in the literature to measure the performance of environmental reporting, legitimacy, and economic performance, were identified. These determinant factors were then correlated with the level of environmental disclosure from the reports of the companies analyzed. The evaluation of the level of environmental reporting enabled us to identify: (i) the most evident aspects are related to atmospheric emissions and solid waste; (ii) the reports lack information on goals for reducing impacts; (iii) the lack of standards for comparison; and (iv) the need to expand information on the quantitative and financial data related to environmental impact. The analysis of the determining factors revealed a canonical correlation between the annual report and auditing, and between the sustainability report and environmental variables (potential pollutants, members of the environmental sustainability index, dissemination of information on the website and the sustainability report). However, there was little correlation between performance of environmental disclosure in the annual and sustainability reports with the economic variables, with a positive correlation only for the economic variable related to company size.