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The main objective of this paper was to investigate whether there is an association amongst SMEs' attitudes, awareness on environmental issues and their environmental management practices. A questionnaire-based survey was chosen to obtain the information on attitudes, awareness and environmental management practices of SMEs. The questionnaire was developed to find out SMEs' current environmental management practices as well as their attitudes and awareness on environmental issues. The associations amongst attitudes, awareness and environmental practices for waste, energy, and the environment were investigated by calculating correlation coefficient. These analyses revealed that there is no significant association between attitudes and awareness or attitudes and environmental management practices. Attitudes appear to be remaining positive even where awareness is limited. Managers/owners who expressed rather more positive attitudes appear no more likely introduce environmental management practices for their organizations than managers/owners with less or negative attitude. The Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) are identified as one of the leading group of economic activities globally and support a substantial part of the economic activities in the Asia Pacific region. The number of SMEs in each country accounts for more than 60% of their domestic industrial production. In Thailand, SMEs make up 99% of the total business enterprises and the number is increasing with3.6percentage for small-sized and 9.8% for medium - sized of annual growth rate. Their contribution to the Gross Domestic Production (GDP) amounted to 40%. Approximately 4.5 million workers in Vietnam are employed by SMEs. In India, 50% of the country's total exports are manufactured by SMEs (http//www.iges). In Sri Lanka SMEs constitute 80-90% of total establishments and 20% of industrial value added. It accounts for 70% of employment generated in the business sector (Cooray and Silva, 2008). With this strong influence on economic and social matters, environmental impacts attributes to the SMEs are significant, not only the magnitude but also diversity. The environmental impacts of small firms are not known either at national or regional levels. It is widely quoted that, as a sector, SMEs could contribute up to 70% of all industrial pollution (Hillary, 1995). The influential may be more in the Asia - Pacific than any other region in the world because of the rapid economic growth of the region today. In spite of the fact, however, the measures undertaken so far have not yielded impressive results. Especially when compared to those large companies. Thus, the environmental performance of SMEs remains week in many parts of the region and it is believed that the environmental damage caused by SMEs will grow unless innovative strategies are devised. On the hand, SMEs are in the region now facing the challenge of competitive market. However, many of them struggling with survival strategies. Thus making issues of competitiveness and marketing top priorities, while environmental issues are far behind. In Sri Lanka, SMEs consist of both manufacturing and service sector enterprises in a wide spectrum of industry disciplines. In addition to the standalone enterprise nature, these SMEs play an important role in supply chain links to the large industry/service sector too. The national strategy of Government of Sri Lanka has clearly recognized the importance of SME sector development. Therefore number of programs aimed at making SMEs more competitive by applying modern technology to improve production processes and make SMEs more efficient. However SME sector in Sri Lanka is typically associated with high adverse environmental impacts due to the sheer number of units, and some of them are dominant in resource and |
