Business Guidelines for Environmentally Friendly Plastic Industry in The Digital Era

Abstract

: At present, the total revenue of plastic production in the plastic industry is continuously decreasing. The purpose of this study was to investigate the business practices of the environmentally friendly plastic industry in the digital era and then develop it into a structural equation model. Then it was developed into a structural equation model. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were integrated into this research. The quantitative data were collected with questionnaires from 5 0 0 executives of plastic industry businesses. Descriptive, referential, and multivariate statistics were used to analyze the data. It was found that there were 4 components prioritized as follows: 1 ) Marketing Orientation (𝑥̅= 4 .2 8 ), 2 ) Innovation (𝑥̅= 4 .1 7 ), 3 ) Resources (𝑥̅= 4.15), and 4) Business alliances (𝑥̅= 4.15), respectively. The detailed item found most important in each element was: explore new markets for environmentally friendly plastic products to expand business opportunities, study and develop new raw materials durable for reuse, provide a process of using used plastic products to produce new products to add value, and collaborate with various business groups to improve practice guidelines under the concept of 3R to be environmentally friendly. As for the hypothesis testing, it was found that small, medium and large businesses differently recognized the importance of the studied guidelines at the statistical significance level of 0 .0 5. The analysis of the developed structural equation model revealed that it passed the assessment criteria and was consistent with the empirical data. The calculated values of the probability of chi-square, the relative chi-square, the index of consistency, and the root mean squared error of approximation were 0.101, 1.128, 0.960, and 0.016, respectively.