Compliance with Environmental Requirements by Small and Medium-Sized Businesses in The context of a Critical State of the Donbass Environment

Abstract

Building a new modern competitive economy in eastern Ukraine and creating an additional impetus for the development of Donetsk and Luhansk regions is an integral prerequisite for the restoration of the country’s territorial integrity. To this end, the Government of Ukraine is planning to introduce an experiment on the formation of territories of priority development in Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Given the key role of production in generating demand for innovation, the emphasis on the production sphere will be crucial in the restoration of the economy of the region. For this purpose, a pool of industrial, construction, logistics, transport, engineering, financial proposals that can generate a comprehensive solution for the restoration and modernization of the region will be formed. Ensuring compliance with environmental requirements by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is a serious problem for environmental bodies around the world, not least because this category of enterprises is characterized by features that make it difficult to apply traditional methods of compliance with the requirements. In Ukraine, the SME sector is at the stage of formation, but we can expect that the number of such entities and, as a consequence, their environmental impact will increase, in particular, as a result of the implementation of politicians and strategies aimed at supporting this sector. Although such strategies contain many positive elements, they usually do not pay due attention to environmental issues; On the contrary, some measures lead to such undesirable side effects as restrictions or even a prohibition on environmental inspections. Against this background, environmental bodies are faced with the need to improve existing ones and the introduction of new tools that would help to comply with environmental requirements. Keywords small business, ecology, environment, program, enterprise, economy, region.