Clean Technology in Micro And Small Companies: empiric evidence on the impact of Environmental Regulations

This article aims to comprehend the forces which regulate the interaction between companies and environment, mainly the ones obliged by environmental laws. Our main proposition is to learn that environmental regulations can show the gaps in the processes of environment management, suggest improvements, increase awareness on environment problems, reduce expenses for companies as well as become an unnecessary cost to the company and consequently jeopardize the competitiveness or impose barriers to clean technologies innovations for the productive process. This paper uses an exploratory study in micro and small businesses and the results display that it is not possible yet to confirm that environmental laws can change the productive processes to reduce pollution and that the companies which introduced changes according to the regulations had some level of support from universities or research institutions.