摘要：This article researches the prime reasons for the meat industries located in Goiás-Brazil to do environmental investments. Two hypotheses about the firm environmental behavior tested: the reagent environmental behavior from neoclassic economics and 2) the entrepreneur environmental behavior derived of the Shumpeterian evolutionism. It was appeared that 100% of the cold storage plants did investments in decantation lagoons because is a condition for the environmental licensing (reagent behavior). On the other hand, only 24% of the companies monitor the complete origin of bovine meat, because not yet it is a requirement in the institucional environment (entrepreneur behavior). Additionally, it was cheked that for the most of companies researched, the environmental investiments does not represent a factor of competitiveness, as much in the search of the reduction of costs as improve in its image faced with the market consumer. Thus, was evidenced the reagent character of the cold storage plants up aginst the environmental problem, corroborating with the neoclassic hypothesis about companies environmental behavior.
