Adding the Green Advantage A Survey of Australian SME's

Executive Summary

Small and Medium Enterprise's ( SME's ) have largely been ignored in the move to increasing the awareness of business on environmental matters. This is largely as the focus on SME's is often on the difficulty of complying with environmental legislation based on the lack of resources and other burdens of compliance. In ignoring an individual SME due to their lack of environmental impact, the whole question of effective environmental management in business in Australia is put in doubt ,as collectively SME's make up approximately 90% of Australian business.

The survey was sent to 843 SME's at random across Australia, roughly in proportion to the respective state business population. Of these 83 replied on questions on their;

· Attitude to sustainability
· Stakeholder opinion on environmental matters.
· Environmental Issues they wanted to address
· Barriers to implementing effective environmental management
· Incentives to undertake effective environmental management.

Notwithstanding the limited response that was received from the survey a significant number of the respondent SME's (66.25%) saw environmental management in their business as important or vital to their business. Importantly, they also identified that their key stakeholders including customers, suppliers and staff also saw environmental issues as important.

The areas that the SME's considered as most important to address were Waste Management, Water Efficiency and Energy Efficiency. Not unexpectedly, they identified time and cost as a major barrier to the implementation of these. Another barrier identified was government attitudes, but unfortunately there was no elaboration of these.

Surprisingly, the least preferred methods of assistance to overcome these barriers were newsletter, a web site and consultations. What the SME's preferred were Financial Assistance (29%) Tax Concessions (38.98%) and Subsidies (35.09%).

This survey will now play an important role in developing a clear strategy in a Local Government area in engaging SME's to implement effective environmental strategies. This will have an important outcome not only to the SME's involved, but the Local Government area and the State in which the trial is conducted, in achieving their environmental outcomes.

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