Global business: operating in the green.

F or years, the Halliburton Company followed local standards in its management of Brazil's state-owned oil company in Catu. This meant discharging stormwater runoff and wastewater effluents directly into the Catu River, untreated. Then, in 1994, the Dallas, Texas-based energy and engineering company initiated new company-wide environmental standards. In Catu, that meant an effort to reduce the pollution going into the river. The company engaged its 70 local employees in a project to identify elements of the waste stream and then find ways to reduce waste and properly treat and dispose of the remainder. The result was the construction of a water treatment facility that treats 100% of the water it releases into the river. But that was only the start. The waste stream study also identified the need for a sanitary landfill, not only for Halliburton, but for the entire community. Then, after the landfill opened in 1996, the company and community saw the need to better manage the stream of landfill waste. So Halliburton began an educational program for city employees that led to a citywide waste reduction and recycling program. In addition , the city of Catu has begun to sell recyclable materials from the landfill to purchase food for the city's poor. By 1999, more than 15 tons of food had been purchased. The story of Halliburton and Catu is one of 12 case studies discussed in the 1999 report Fostering Environmental Prosperity, published by the Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI), a nonprof-it organization of major global companies who contend that good environmental practices and good business practices go hand-in-hand-even when doing business in a developing country with low environmental standards. In its efforts to adopt environmentally friendly (or, at least, friendlier) environmental management standards company-wide, Halliburton was following a broad corporate trend that many believe can date its inception to 3 December 1984, the day a Union Carbide storage tank in Bhopal, India, burst open and sent a cloud of poisonous methyl isocyanate gas out into the community, killing by some estimates as many as 6,000 people within a week and some 13,000 to date. Subsequent highly publicized accounts of developed countries shipping hazardous waste to poor nations further focused world attention on the environmental dangers facing developing countries in an increasingly globalized industrial economy. Over the intervening years, the environmental costs that developing countries bear in the new world economy have been addressed by …