Environmental management systems as sustainable tools in the way of life for the SMEs and VSMEs.

Small medium enterprises (SMEs) and very small medium enterprises (VSMEs) are the economic backbone of the most economies in Europe. Those VSMEs have mono-service or product, they feel economic pressure, they sell to the local market, they are family traditions and they are informal organizations, they have very "low management", they have employees from different nationalities, they have little access to adult training and to the new requirements of the market, they do not federate and they produce high amount of waste. The research question of our study was: why do SMEs build up environmental management systems (EMS)? This paper presents the need for the implementation of the EMS as a sustainable tool in order to monitor the production of the waste from SMEs and VSMEs. The paper presents benefits, disadvantages, motivation, differences from the international literature in order to present the necessity for the implementation of the EMS. Copyright (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.