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Industry has long been one of the most important drivers of Chinese economic growth. In order to improve the environmental footprint of industrial areas, Chinese authorities have established mechanisms of environmental control in the internal management processes of companies. In this regard, the international standard ISO 14001 for environmental management systems is the management tool that has had widest adoption among Chinese companies since its creation in 1996. The main purposes of the paper are to investigate the available international and national statistics on the adoptionof ISO 14001 in China, and present opinions on ISO 14001 of the 72 representatives of small and medium enterprises and multinational companies of Guangdong province that participated to the workshop “New tools and standards to advance and measure corporate sustainability”, held in Guangzhou on 26 January 2018. The analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) was adopted as the research method to collect opinions on the ISO 14001 standard. Participants were asked to discuss strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities considering four business aspects: sustainability, internal processes, stakeholder engagement, and resource management. Our findings indicate that companies fully embraced ISO 14001 and recognized the necessity of a standardized approach to identify environmental aspects. On the other hand, they also expressed concern about aspects such as the certification cost, the focus on certification itself and not on the improvement of environmental performance, and the lack of integration with sustainability tools such as life cycle assessment (LCA) and other sustainability paradigms such as circular economy and corporate social responsibility (CSR).

The concept of circular economy (CE) has recently gained momentum in the political, scientific, and economic debate, especially in China and Europe. As a result, organizations and scholars have started to establish different sets of principles for its adoption. For this reason, it is important to identify and assess the differences and similarities among existing sets of CE principles, and how organizations and individuals understand and translate them into practice. In this paper, we firstly present a brief review and analysis of the coherence among six existing sets of principles. Our analysis finds that, despite the mixed degree of coherence, all sets describe the necessity to implement CE principles at all levels of a company. We then present the results of an in-depth qualitative survey that investigates how 19 key informants representing small, medium, and multinational companies based in China understand and carry out the CE principles laid out by the BSI standard BS 8001:2017; how these principles can transform the culture and processes of these companies; and what are the opportunities and threats that such transformation can bring. Results describe a good awareness and knowledge of the CE principles and an optimistic outlook concerning their adoption. At the same time, numerous barriers and threats that the implementation of these principles might entail are presented. Overall, respondents confirm the complexity of implementing the principles of the CE in an integrated and consistent way in the management and strategies of Chinese companies and highlight the challenges that might arise during their implementation.

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