Green Manufacturing in Agro Processing SMEs: Unraveling the Relationship Between Drivers and Their Effects on Adoption Practices in Ghana

William Gyasi-Mensah

doi:10.5296/ijgs.v3i1.15746

Abstract

Environmental matters have been a subject of importance for national policy makers, ecology concerned groups and organizations. Green initiatives such as, green manufacturing has been seen to be a game changer in ensuring environmentally safe manufacturing by firms and nations while reaping the accompanying benefits. Investigations into motivating factors are still not fully carried out from all contexts. This research sought to find the effects that these drivers have on adoption of eco-friendly initiatives among small and medium enterprises from a developing country context. Structural Equation Model was adopted to analyze the data and verify the hypotheses. The outcomes indicate that financial and business benefits, competitor pressure and national environmental regulations positively influenced the adoption of green manufacturing adoption initiatives. Management and staff commitment influenced adoption slightly. These outcomes are vital to developing strategies for improving green practices implementation within firms for positive environmental and economic performance. Governments in developing nations especially Ghana will be well informed on which parts of the regulations to strengthen and enforce for improved environmental responsibility from Ghanaian agro processing small and medium enterprises and other businesses.

Highlights

In past decades, the subject of sustainability and greening has attained heightened attention from both actors in business and the general society
The structural equation modeling method is applied in the analysis and in applying the it, there were eleven unobserved latent variables: management and staff commitment (MSC); financial and business benefits (FBB); firm resources (FRS); consumer awareness and demand (CAD); competitor influence or pressure Competitor influence or pressure (CIP)); national environmental regulation influence (NEI); green management practices (GMP); green design practices (GDP); green purchasing practices (GPP); green promotion and selling (GPS); green logistics practices
Relationships exist between the motivators and the practices that are adopted among small and medium enterprises (SMEs)

Summary

Introduction

The subject of sustainability and greening has attained heightened attention from both actors in business and the general society. The reason being that development in a sustainable manner has come to be seen as the appropriate approach towards achieving a fairer and prosperous world in which the natural resources, the environment and mankind can coexist and be protected for the benefit of coming generations (Evangelista et al, 2018). The relevance of considering environmental aspects in the business context can be found in the current literature. Commitment to the environment has become a key variable in the contemporary competitive scenario (Molina-Azorin et al, 2015; Soubihia et al, 2015). Companies recognize the fact that environmental sustainability has implications for their competitive positions (Godinho Filho & Ganga, 2016). There is a growing interest of the state, managers, customers, employees and academics regarding marketing strategies focused on the environment (Kumar & Christodoulopoulou, 2014)

Methods

Results

Conclusion