Minimizing environmental
IMPACT
The necessity of ensuring a sustainable business
A regular agenda item for senior leadership teams at many of the world ’ s most successful businesses is ensuring that the whole company is doing its best to help the planet be sustainable now .
While some businesses still see ‘ being green ’ as a tick-box exercise to distract from their misdeeds , at wellrun businesses there has been for some time been the realization that they need to be as environmentally sustainable as possible and that ‘ greenwashing ’ increasingly backfires .
Few businesses face the extreme challenges that mining and extraction businesses encounter in ensuring their operations minimize environmental impact , given that the nature of mining inherently involves finding , extracting , processing and transporting huge amounts of material , often from some of the world ’ s remotest places .
All of these are going to have an environmental impact , often very large , no matter what steps are taken to minimize it – and yet , minimize it you must .
In the last decade , ensuring a business minimizes harm to the environment has become a key requirement for stakeholders – whether activists , investors , governments , NGOs , the media or most recently customers . It is also ethically the right thing to do .
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