Sustainable development of small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises in the European Union: A taxonomy of circular economy practices

Abstract

This paper focuses on the implementation of circular economy (CE) practices in small‐ and medium‐sized firms in all 28 European Union (EU) countries. The analyses take into account the hierarchical nature of the collected data as firms are nested within EU countries, that is, the heterogeneity between different types of firms and countries according to practices and attitudes towards CE. The multilevel latent class model identifies groups of firms and groups of EU countries that are homogeneous in terms of CE, that is, how the homogeneous groups of small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) are distributed across the groups of EU countries. These results, together with the fact that firms with similar CE attitudes and practices have different demographic and business profiles across groups of countries, shed further light on the topic of green behavior in the EU with implications for businesses' environmental policies. Moreover, indications emerge that European policies favoring the implementation of CE practices should be targeted at least for subgroups of European countries, considering the different composition by typology of SMEs operating in their territories and that, at the same time, policies should be defined within each group of countries to account for the specific features of each of the four classes of SMEs.

Firm Growth as a Driver of Sustainable Product Innovation: Mediation and Moderation Analysis. Evidence from Manufacturing Firms

“…Access to this cross-national database was provided by the GESIS. Use of the Eurobarometer surveys is relatively common in environmental management empirical research (e.g., [ 109 , 110 ]).…”

Analysing the risks of adopting circular economy initiatives in manufacturing supply chains

“…The rationale behind CE can be applied to various departments such as procurement, manufacturing and information systems within an organisation (Ansari & Kant, 2017). It requires organisations to redesign the SC network around sustainable development (Bassi & Dias, 2020; Brown & Bajada,2018; Yadav, Luthra, Jakhar, Mangla, & Rai, 2020). It also helps to identify the risks and mitigate them with the right sustainable practices.…”

Reevaluating waste as a resource under a circular economy approach from a system perspective: Findings from a case study

“…Consistently with Perey et al (2018), we believe that the study of exemplar organizations that changed their business models to solve the tension of waste as a burden and/or resource could support foundations for the emergence of CE. In the review, only two articles are based on case studies, so more studies are needed to investigate empirically the role of waste in business models of organizations and to shed light on CE implementation at the company level (Barreiro‐Gen & Lozano, 2020; Bassi & Dias, 2020; Brown & Bajada, 2018; Dey et al, 2020; Katz‐Gerro & López, 2019; Prieto‐Sandoval, Ormazabal, Jaca, & Viles, 2018; Stewart & Niero, 2018).…”