Environmental Website Disclosure of ICT Use and Compliance Management

Abstract

The concept of ‘Environmental Management' includes the responsibility to ensure that the company complies with environmental laws and regulations. Because this responsibility is not only exercised towards authorities, but also towards the stakeholders, and because growing environmental awareness is combined with the growing development of ICT, some companies publish their information concerning ‘environmental compliance management' on their corporate websites. The present exploratory website study was performed to fill the research gap in the field of environmental website disclosure through a survey of 170 large production companies in the USA and in Europe. The analysis of the empirical data suggests that corporate websites contain only limited information about ICT use for environmental management and environmental compliance management. Because very large and mostly global corporations were observed, only small differences between the two regions were expected. However, the study revealed that the USA companies outperformed the European companies in terms of extent of disclosure.