Green Innovation and Business Sustainability: New Evidence from Energy Intensive Industry in China.

Liang Li,Mei Xuen Tan,Hajar Msaad,Antonio K.W Lau,Yeqing Lu,Huaping Sun

doi:10.3390/ijerph17217826

Abstract

Chinese manufacturing has recently undertaken the responsibility of energy conservation and emission reduction to address climate change. This research analyzes green innovation on business sustainability in the energy-intensive industry in China from the manager perspective, researched data from 229 Chinese managers via structural equation modeling (SEM). The results demonstrated that green innovation had three dimensions: green product innovation, recycling, and green publicity. Business sustainability also had three dimensions: financial performance, environmental performance, and social performance. It also shows that green innovation had a significant effect on business sustainability in the energy-intensive industry. More specifically, we found that recycling has more impact on social performance when compared with green publicity. However, green publicity has a large effect on environmental performance; moreover, green product innovation has more impact on financial performance than green publicity. We also found that environmental performance has a positive effect on financial and social performance results. The alternative models were used to examine the second-order factors of green innovation and business sustainability to test the study’s robustness and supported our findings. Thus, this study contributes to the field by helping managers to make decisions when dealing with sustainable environmental management. It provides new empirical evidence to support the development of a low-carbon circular economy and realization of a carbon-neutral goal by 2060 in China.

Highlights

Global warming has intensified in recent years, and the increase in extreme weather events worldwide has damaged the ecosystems
This paper aims to investigate that the factors that affect energy-intensive corporate business sustainability from the perspective of three aspects, such as financial performance, environmental performance, and social performance set of associations by energy-intensive corporates that allow sustainability to gain strength
We found that that green product innovation could facilitate financial performance, environmental performance, and social green product innovation could facilitate financial performance, environmental performance, and performance

Summary

Introduction

Global warming has intensified in recent years, and the increase in extreme weather events worldwide has damaged the ecosystems. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and coping with global climate change has become a standard task facing humanity [1,2]. In China, industrial manufacturing and energy-intensive industries still account for a larger share of the economy. This industry can cause an increase in carbon dioxide emissions and severe air pollution. Even the global climate system poses a severe threat that somewhat ignores environmental innovation [3,4]. In this context, more developed countries are engaged in developing energy conservation and emission

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Results

Conclusion