How Sustainability Reports Align to Sustainable Development Goals: Insights From Naples' Waste Management Company

Sustainability reporting is crucial to follow up companies' alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through increased transparency to identify companies' impacts. However, the large flexibility and lack of clear quantitative targets hamper the integration of sustainability reporting with the SDGs, reducing sustainability declarations to appendices of traditional financial reports. We examined the sustainability reports from 2010 to 2020 of ASIA s.p.a, a public utility company in Naples, as a case study. We evaluate the quantitative and qualitative social-ecological information related to the SDGs. Later, national SDG targets were downscaled to the company level in order to assess the company's degree of alignment or divergence. The results indicate that an overemphasis on economic data, compared to socio-environmental aspects, risks compromising the effectiveness of their disclosure. Additionally, the absence of quantitative targets for reducing negative impacts minimizes the potential of these reports as strategic tools for corporate organization.