Environmental Responsibilities
In today's business world, there have been many rules and regulations imparted upon the corporate environment that are enforced by specialized institutions that oversee the environmental obligations that our society has established. Throughout the generations, as science and technology have produced new capabilities for understanding the natural world, as well as with a considerable amount of trial and error, science has been able to establish an understanding of the extent of damages that pollution can cause. There are many forms of pollution; soil, water, air, radioactive, and even noise to name a few.
These pollutants can not only be damaging to the local ecology, but many of these substances are now understood to effect natural systems on a global scale as is the case with greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. The changing environment is already becoming associated with extreme weather events but the worst effects will be one future generations. Yet other forms of pollution have a more immediate effect. For example, chemicals like benzene and even secondhand smoke have been linked to cancer...
However, before these regulations were established, it was generally completely legal to dispose of harmful substances in any manner in which the company felt was appropriate. Companies would dump industrial waste products directly into rivers and streams and many of the pollutants would eventually make their way into the community drinking
water supplies and be ingested by the individuals as well as were responsible for a host of other problematic environmental issues.
Today there is a general consensus that it is the responsibility of the polluter in most situations to pay for the damages they cause from their pollution emissions. Before such regulations were implemented however, companies would impart the costs of their pollution onto the
public while keeping all of the profits that they earned through their
operations. Therefore, they externalized many of the costs while keeping all of the profits internally. Furthermore, many of the leaders responsible for such actions were not even conscious of what they were doing. Although many people could intuitively perceive that pollution was having negative effects on surrounding areas, it was entirely legal to dump pollution in unsafe…
