by the influence of the customers. Nowadays, there is an increasing number of people, who consider environmental factors during their purchasing decision. The third stakeholder who forces companies to set environmental standards is industrial participants. If companies are part of industrial networks, they are forced to fulfill the codes of conduct of these networks. This code of conduct is often set to improve the collective reputation of an industry. Another driving force of industry participants could be a reaction to a competitors action. The environmental standards set by companies themselves can be divided into two dimensions: operational environmental policies and the message sent in advertising and public communications. Operational environmental policies This can be the environmental management, audits, controls, or technologies. In this dimension, the regulations tend to be closely connected with other function areas, e.g. lean production. Furthermore, it could be understood that multinational companies tend to set cross-country harmonized environmental government regulations and therefore reach a higher performance level of environmental standards. It is often argued that companies focus on the second dimension: the message sent in advertising and public communications. To satisfy the stakeholders' requirement, companies were focused on the public impression of their environmental self-commitment standards. Often the real implementation does not play an important role. A lot of companies settle the responsibility for the implementation of low-budget departments. The workers, who were in charge of the standards missing time and financial resources to guarantee a real implementation. Furthermore, within the implementation, goal conflicts arise. The biggest concern of companies is that environmental protection is more expansive compared to the gained beneficial effects. But, there are a lot of positive cost-benefit-calculation for environmental standards set by companies themselves. It is observed that companies often set environmental standards after a public crisis. Sometimes environmental standards were already set by companies to avoid public crises. As to whether environmental self-commitment standards are effective, is controversial. See also Environmental compliance Emission standard Fairtrade certification Environmental certification Environmental data Environmental monitoring Environmental performance Environmental law References External links European Environmental Citizens Organization for Standardisation ISO 14000 Environmental management