New Corporate Forms and Green Business
![handle is hein.journals/wmelpr37 and id is 367 raw text is: NEW CORPORATE FORMS AND GREEN BUSINESS
ANTONY PAGE*
ABSTRACT
You want to start a business: not just an ordinary business,
producing ordinary social benefit, but a dual-mission business that will
both make a profit and benefit the environment. This green business, you
expect, will sometimes face trade-offs between the missions, in the sense
that sometimes owners' wealth and profit will have to be sacrificed to
pursue environmental benefits. You're optimistic, in that you hope the
business will find outside investors and will scale up easily. Moreover,
you don't want to lie or even dissemble about your motives or about the
business's actions. You want to be both authentic and transparent. This
Article looks at whether and how law, by means of recently enacted cor-
porate organizational forms-benefit corporations, flexible purpose corpo-
rations and social purpose corporations---can help.
INTRODUCTION
Maryland started the trend with its enactment of the benefit
corporation in April 2010.' The bill received overwhelming support:
unanimous in the Senate and 135-5 in the House.2 It was modeled on an
initiative from B Lab, a Pennsylvania-based non-profit that had already
pioneered a private certification program, the B Corporation,' for socially
* Vice Dean & Professor of Law, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law,
Indianapolis. I would like to thank the editors and staff at this journal for their assis-
tance. This essay is based on a presentation at the 2012 William and Mary Environmental
Law and Policy Review Symposium, Managing Green Business: Defining, Regulating, and
Supporting Environmentally Responsible Businesses.
'See John Tozzi, Maryland Passes 'Benefit Corp.'Law for Social Entrepreneurs, BLOOMBERG
BUSINESSWEEK (Apr. 13, 2010), http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running-small
business/archives/2010/04/benefit corp..bi.html.
Id.
Id. A certified B Corporation is any organization, including LLCs or traditional cor-
porations, that has been certified by the non[-]profit B Lab to meet rigorous standards
of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. What Are
B Corps?, CERTIFIED B CORPORATION, http://www.bcorporation.net/what-are-b-corps (last
visited Jan. 31, 2013). It is like a good housekeeping seal of approval, rather than an
347](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/wmelpr37&div=15&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
What Is HeinOnline?
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most
New Corporate Forms and Green Business
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most