Since the last decades of the 20th century, businesses have been pressured by new demands of society in order to present a more conscious and sustainable behavior. Aiming to adapt to this new paradigm, most medium to large sized companies have directed their strategies and actions to recognize environmental and social concerns. Environmental management has become an essential tool to guide and promote these sometimes new corporate values. The goal of this dissertation is to understand and categorize the environmental practices by Brazilian companies and see if they influence their economic and financial performances. Data were collected from secondary sources about the environmental initiatives of enterprises (Magazine Análise Gestão Ambiental), as well as on its financial indicators (Magazine Exame, BOVESPA website and the official statements of the companies). The data were statistically analyzed with SPSS 17.0 software. Some proposed taxonomies of environmental management were analyzed and were verified if the behavior of the companies surveyed fit them. For this purpose, the tool TwoStep cluster analysis was used. In the end, the financial indicators of the groups found, depending on the type of environmental management adopted, were analyzed by means of ANOVA and MANOVA statistical tools to see if there were differences between the financial performance of these groups. The results of this analysis for the sample of 142 companies suggests that environmental management practices can be classified into two distinct categories companies more reactive and more proactive and that there are not significant differences between the financial performance of these groups.