Now that they will in the future be included in the TRI, reports from them are starting to come out. You see benefits both competitively and in terms of stakeholder relationships. If the company is seen by regulators as being proactive and willing to go farther in environmental performance, they are more likely to receive faster permitting and more flexible treatment by regulators. For example, a quarry company believes its permitting process has moved more quickly due to its proactive environmental stand. Companies might be less targeted by environmental groups if they showed proactive environmental performance that is described in their environmental reports.
Customers play a role, especially in the case of large companies.
For example, General Motors now requires some of its suppliers to meet the ISO 14000 standards. Internally, environmental reporting forces companies to think about their environmental performance in a unified fashion and how it fits within the corporate strategy. A few companies have started to try to quantify the exact benefits of their improved environmental performance, which you can find in the reports. Environmental reporting does not directly lead to those benefits, but it forces companies to think about just how much they save through their environmental program. Its reliability is not clear.