Investigating the phenomenon of environmental investments in the Swedish pharmaceutical industry - A qualitative analysis of the environmental work of three companies

The environmental challenge of any company is to sustain long-term survival and\ncompetitive advantage through effective environmental practices (Epstein and Roy, 2000).\nThis may be achieved if companies seek beyond legislative compliance through voluntary\nactions to resolve environmental problems. Implementation of such environmental practices\nrequires various environmental investments to be undertaken. The impacts on the\nenvironment vary between industries, so companies have their own specific problems to\naddress, thus also their own specific environmental challenge. In order to achieve enhanced\nenvironmental performance and competitive advantage, the company’s position in managing\nenvironmental issues has to be based on the context of the particular environmental\nchallenge of the company (Reinhardt, 1999). Furthermore, it is assumed that a company’s\nlevel of environmental performance is proportional to how well environmental investments\nare undertaken to correlate with the environmental challenge. The pharmaceutical industry\nhas previously been known for voluntary actions in terms of environmental practices, but\nsome researchers proclaim the opposite (Blum-Kusterer and Hussain, 2001). For this reason,\nthe purpose of this study is to map out the phenomenon of environmental investments in the\ncontext of the Swedish pharmaceutical industry. This study’s main finding was that not\nmuch has changed over the last 18 years since the latest survey regarding environmental\ninvestments in industry (Baumann and Bjerndell, 1990). The pharmaceutical industry is\nfocused on managing environmental problems of today through pollution prevention\nstrategies. Environmental investments are undertaken in resemblance with TQM thinking\n- preventing mistakes saves costs (Bring Procopé and Axelsson, 2003). In this study, different\nperspectives in environmental management literature have been applied to develop an\nanalytical framework. The framework was used to investigate, and compare the environmental\nwork of three pharmaceutical companies: AstraZeneca, Recip, and Pfizer. Empirical data has\nmainly been gathered from the companies’ publicly available environmental reports, but also\nfrom interviews with environmental representatives of the companies.