Covenants are voluntary contracts between the government and industrial sectors that address environmental impacts common to a large number of companies, such as the production of packaging waste (EPE 1996). The government typically negotiates with trade associations to meet industry-wide targets, and individual firms then sign on to sectoral covenants via letters of declaration.
The concept of voluntary business-government agreements began in the Netherlands and caught on across Europe in the early 1990s. As of 1996, there were 305 such agreements, with two thirds of them in the Netherlands and Germany (Harrison 1999:24
