This study aims at analyzing the relationship between determinantfactors of disclosure of information on environmental impacts of Brazilian companies. A descriptive, documental and quantitative research was conducted through a sample of 97 Brazilian companies. In the Sustainability Reports and in the Annual Reports information, five environmental aspects were collected: emissions, effluents, wastes, products and services; and transport, which were used to measure the degree of environmental disclosure. This concludes that there is a relationship between the variables investigated in all analyzed years. The size, audit and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) are associated with disclosure and the Corporate Sustainability Index (CSI), Pollution Potential(POTEN), governance, stocks, Return on Assets (ROA) and Return on Equity (ROE) are not.

Introduction

In the last 30 years,the impact of companies on the environment has become a growing concern among environmentalists, legislators, customers, public authorities and society in general. Thus, 15 years ago companies began to emphasize more on environmental strategies in the light of institutional pressures. These strategies are reported by using indicators and can be classified according to the environmental commitment they represent (Albertini, 2013). The Legitimacy Theory provides explanations on the motivation of the administration to disseminate information regarding the environment in environmental reports (Wilmshurst & Frost, 2000). In this sense, Magness (2006) points outthat one ofthe principles ofthe Legitimacy Theory is that companies use the disclosure to transmit information on how they deal with the environment. For Kuo and Chen (2013), in recent years, this theory has become dominant in research about environmental disclosure, since the environmental legitimacy discloses the company as environmentally responsible. Nossa (2002) emphasizes that awareness and concern with the environment are increasingly present in society. That is why companies invest in environmental programs, because they discover that polluting is the same as wasting, not being efficient and not being able to compete. After all, society pressures government and companies regarding the preservation of the environment, and this pressure increases as the pollution caused by the activities of organizations increases. This is when companies set goals to minimize environmental impacts on emissions of liquid and gaseous effluents, recycling of materials, among others, in order to legitimize their activities. This study assumes that the environmental performance, transparency and economic performance lead companies to disclose information on the environmental impacts. This expectation is also verified in studies conducted by Hackston and Milne (1996), Zeng, Xu, Dong, and Tam (2010), Bouten, Everaert, and Roberts (2012), Wegener, Elayan, Felton, and Li (2013), Rosa, Guesser, Hein, Pfitscher, and Lunkes (2013) and Rosa, Lunkes, Hein, Vogt, and Degenhart (2014), who have specifically investigated the factors that lead companies to evidence, from the perspective of the Theory of Legitimacy. From the perspective of the Theory of Disclosure, Braga, Oliveira, and Salotti (2009) and Murcia and Santos (2009) also found some factors that lead a company to disclosure. However, none of these studies in particular used the three factors seen in this study.