The environmental work of companies has become an incredibly important factor in achieving reduced levels of environmental pollution. For companies the work on environmental issues began in the 1980s. During this time companies also began to show interest for the personnel, an interest that was shown in the form of attempts to disclose personnel information in economics. Earlier this information was separated from the financial information, despite the fact that the revenues are created by the employees.The purpose of this paper is to examine how well companies with a notification or a permit today account for environmental- and personnel information in their director?s report.

In the last few years the environment becomes more watchful, even for us farmers. All agricultural enterprises that exceed 200 animal units must be tested according to regulation of environment. A farm business with 200 animal units and more is classed ?environmentally hazardous activities? and has to make an environmental impact assessment for the business you have today, and the activity after expansion. Before you can construct a building and expand the numbers of animals is a lot of applications to make. I have in this project restricted me to establish a environmental impact assessment and a consultation foundation. To make a environmental impact assessment is the big part of the application. The environmental impact assessment take a lot of time and you need skills for all the rules in the environmental code to be abele to make an environmental impact assessment approved. The environment codes purposes (1 kap 1 § Miljöbalken) is to rule the laws. The purpose of the environment code is to promote sustainable development which will assure a healthy and sound environment for present and future generations. Definitions of a ?environmentally hazardous activities? 9 kap 1§ Miljöbalken) shall mean the discharges of wastewater, solid matter or gas from land, buildings or structures onto land or into water areas or ground water.

The environment became an established issue on the international political agenda after World War 2. How to preserve natural resources became an issue that concerned several powerful participants, affected by changed conditions in the environmental legislation. This paper is a study of the growing environmental work within the multinational Swedish corporations Boliden, IKEA and SAS and how it was affected by the globalization. The material studied is environmentally related information produced by the companies and also interviews with the Environmental Managers. The information provided has been analyzed and compared with well-known opinions of globalization, trying to find out how the process of globalization has affected the handling of environmental work within the companies.

According to the Conventions on the Rights of the Child, children have the right to make their voices heard and express their opinion in situations concerning them. With this paper the authors have chosen to explore social worker?s view?s on children?s participation and influence, and how these are manifested through the entire case process. The focus in this study has also been the positive and negative effects the children?s influence may have.To investigate this, a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews has been conducted.

The project this report is handling has been implemented on NBB, Nordisk Bilbelysning AB in Linköping. The company produces and develops lightning and searchlights for all types of vehicles. Lately NBB´s supplier of electronics, OSRAM, has developed a mercuryfree xenon lightsource. Mercury is one of the most hazardous environmental waste and to get rid of the mercury entirely in the lightsource is a big step that means alot for the environment.This lightsource will be placed in one of NBB´s worksearchlights called My, and will be sold as an alternative to mercurycontaining searchlights. NBB wants to put an environmental label on this product and they want to have essential information about the product that is needed for the production.

The representative democracy has become weakened during the last decades. At the same time the United Nations declared at the Rio de Janeiro meeting in 1992 that environmental problems can best be solved by involvement of all concerned citizens in decision-making. The main purpose of this study has been to examine if citizens panels is a possible way to involve citizens in environmental decision-making and what the outcomes can be. Furthermore the study has investigated what the participation has contributed to environmental politics and how representative the results have been. This has been carried out by investigating the Piteåpanel in the municipality of Piteå by conducting interviews.The result of the study shows that the involvement of the citizens in the decision-making influenced the environmental politics of the municipality.

This thesis examines the environmental benefits resulting from the choice of environmental certification scheme, with focus on energy. This was carried out by studying the measures that were implemented as a result of the certification of Sweco's three largest office buildings in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. The office property in Stockholm has been certified with the Swedish Environmental Building, Gothenburg with the British BREEAM and Malmö with the U.S system LEED.The results from the study indicate that an environmental certification can reduce the energy consumption by up to 59 percent and the water consumption by 20 to 66 percent. However; the interviews, literature study and simulations in MATLAB indicate that the size and scope of these environmental benefits depend on several identified factors: the type of building and its conditions, system selection, grade level, the choice of indicators, the ambition of those involved and when in time the certification process begins. The comparison between Environmental Building, LEED and BREEAM showed that Environmental Building for the office property in Stockholm gave the largest environmental benefit in terms of reduced energy consumption thanks to several large measures.

The history of environmental reporting began in the early 1990?s when some companies included the environmental issue in their annual report. The increased interest of ethical and sustainable investments and demands from different stakeholders conjure a change of the report design. To develop the environmental reports and create design guidance for sustainability reports an organisation called Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) was born. The GRI is environmental reporting taken to another level, a level that is according to sustainable development.

The aim of this study is to investigate the notion of pupil influence in English teaching at level 1 and 2 at High-School level. The study focuses on how the students and teachers experience the possibility of influence in their English classes. Empirical data has been collected through questionnaires from two classes at year 1 and two classes at year 2 in English. The study also includes interviews from four teachers and four students. The study is both qualitative and quantitative.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how small organisations within the subject field health and training work with their environmental scanning. The main questions in this thesis are: How do the organisations work with business intelligence/environmental scanning? What is their environment like and of which parts does it consist? How extensive is their work with business intelligence/ environmental scanning? Which are their main fields of application and how is the work compiled practically? In order to answer these questions we have chosen to use a qualitative method, which in our case consists of two interviews with people in managerial positions within the health and training subject field. The result of the two interviews is presented in a compilation, and it is thereafter discussed and analyzed. We used an existing theoretical model and altered it in order to correspond to the aim of this research..

The environmental debate is more intensive than ever before and the demands on companies increase. There are a number of methods to make it easier for the companies to fulfil the demands. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) end ecodesign are some of the methods that can be used. Syntronic AB has the possibility to reduce the products´ environmental impact in the design phase. Therefore it is important for the company to make it possible to visualize the negative environmental impacts a product can cause in an easy way. It is also important to visualize for there clients if any improvement is possible. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a simplified model.

AbstractThe real estate sector is today responsible for 40 per cent of the total amount of energy consumption within the members of the EU. All over the world there are collaborations within research and projects to find ways of reducing the amount of energy consumed by the real estate sector. In Sweden, a directive from the European Union has posed demands on authorities as well as on the private sector to reduce the amount of energy consumed by new building constructions. Together with the directive from the EU there are also new requirements and demands from Boverket for the real estate sector.  These requirements mostly concern the energy consumption of kilowatt-hour per square metre and that the consumed energy also should be renewable.  The aim of this study is to explain what kind of value municipalities experience in using certifications and environmental investments for new and existing buildings. Within the chapter theory, essential areas are described such as; environmental certification systems, economical viability, proceeds connected to building green, difficulties with building green, the performance of green buildings when affected by the behaviour of tenants and customer value.  The following chapter describes the methodology with which we have conducted this study.

Mankind has always been communicating, it is almost impossible to not communicate. The communication tree has grown a new branch, the environmental communication branch, and an ISO standard, the ISO 14 063 Environmental communication- guidelines and examples was issued October 2006. The purpose of this thesis is commissioned by the managing director of NQA Nordic AB in order to examine and analyse how organisations communicate environmental issues today, and how big the need for ISO 14 063 actually is, and further more if there are needs and wishes to make ISO 14 063 a certifiable standard. The main conclusion is that the there is a need for the standard, but it is difficult to say in which form since the knowledge about the standard is far to low among the organisations examined in this thesis. Clarity and transparency as ISO 14 063 promotes are important ingredients in organisations? environmental work, so sure a standard for environmental communication can help improve environmental performance, for example through opening up for two-way communication and from that on take part of the stakeholders? opinions.This study is based on a literature study and a questionnaire survey where 70 organisations (in this case authorities, corporations and non-governmental organisations) randomly chosen from the seven criteria, which ISO 14 001 defines as the environment: land, water, air, flora, fauna, natural resources and man and his collaboration with those.

The relationship between free trade and the environment is often considered conflicting and the debates surrounding it are infected. My thesis deal with this conflict and how environmental concerns are integrated in three regional free trade agreements, North American Free Trade Agreement, The common market of the southern cone (MERCOSUR) and Southern African Development Community (SADC). I point out how the organizations differ from each other in this respect and I present a possible explanation to why they differ. The explanation is founded on the theory of the environmental Kuznets curve and that environmental concerns will depend on which level of development the member states in the organizations have. To judge and rank the organizations I have composed a model based on a pre-existing description of the trade and environment conflict.

A uniform environmental rating system for green buildings is demanded in today's society, where the requirements of the energy consumption for real estate are increasing. There are several different systems around the world used to rate buildings, all with different assessment criteria and starting points, which make it difficult to compare environmental rated buildings with each other.The purpose of this paper is to acquire knowledge about the differences between the Swedish environmental rating system Miljöklassad Byggnad and the American LEED, to discover which system is most advantageous. We also examine whether environmental rating affect the value of a property.Miljöklassad Byggnad is relatively simple structured, which makes it possible for private individuals to rate their property. LEED is better structured on the other hand in the case of environmental classification of commercial properties, because there are manuals for among others hospitals, schools and retail. The rating system for Miljöklassad Byggnad is good since the system seeks to fix the number of errors and deficiencies as soon as possible.