From total quality management to total quality environmental management

Abstract

Total quality management (TQM) was developed at the same time as the interest in environmental issues began to emerge and, as such, it has built in the same concepts as those regarding issues relevant to the environment. Suggests the acronym in use today, TQEM (total quality environmental management), clearly reflects its genesis and the existing parallelism between quality and environmental problems. In the vision of a TQM‐oriented company in which, by striving for continuous improvement, quality is deployed to everybody, the analogy with the environmental programme is demonstrated by the fact that it is not necessary to convince anyone of the need to operate in a “greener” manner because each person is already convinced of his/her own role in this domain both as an individual and as an employee of the company.