An assessment of environmental awareness in a South African steel plant

Abstract

During the 21st century, there has been a world-wide increase in the number of regional, national and global environmental challenges (Simsekli, 2015:222), therefore the topic of environmental sustainability has attracted considerable attention during the last decade (Paille & Raineri, 2015:2404). Many governments and stock exchanges now require organisations to provide some level of sustainability reporting. This has resulted in the so called “triple bottom line" reporting which focuses on economic prosperity, environmental quality and social justice. Active participation from employees is impossible without having an understanding of how to contribute towards improving the organisation's environmental performance. Therefore it is important for employees to be informed and/or trained on how they can contribute to the efforts of sustainability endorsed by the organisation (Perron, Côte & Duffy 2006:553). The problem is that although many organisations provide environmental awareness training to employees, the outcome of such training is seldom assessed. The aim of the research was to investigate what the level of environmental awareness is in a South African steel plant. A structured survey-based research study was conducted among the permanent employees of a selected department. This included literature review and the distribution of questionnaires to the employees in the selected department. The aim of the research has been achieved and all the research sub-questions were answered. The study concludes that although the level of environmental awareness among employees is generally high there are actions that can be investigated and implemented to raise the level of environmental awareness even higher.