Making Sustainability Profitable: Corporate Social Responsibility in Waste Management

At a time when climate change and global warming pose unprecedented threats to humanity, companies have been striving to recycle waste responsibly and reduce its production. This paper seeks to investigate whether a company can achieve these aims without compromising the generation of profits, instead trying to increase them in the long run. The real challenge for corporate lawyers is no longer arguing for implementing sustainable policies through the corporate form but reconciling profit maximization and social purposes. The benefit corporation model shows that this is possible, although the discretion of directors may increase, resulting in little or no liability. While sustainability in company law can hardly be achieved through substantive rules, which directly modify the traditional duties of directors, a procedural body of rules, including the non-financial reporting system, may be the right approach to corporate social responsibility. Sustainability does belong to corporate law, but certainly it cannot be pursued to the detriment of the company’s stability and profitability.