Abstract
This study explored the size and potential of green employment for circular economy (CE) in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the European Union, and investigated the role of green jobs and skills for the implementation of CE practices. The data were collected in a Eurobarometer survey, and refer to resource efficiency, green markets, and CE procedures. Lack of environmental expertise is one of the factors that might be perceived as an obstacle when trying to implement resource-efficiency actions. Previous research has shown that, although resource-efficiency practices are adopted by firms in all European countries, there are differences both within and between countries. The analysis of the determinants of green behavior by European SMEs was completed by a study of heterogeneity across firms and within countries with a multilevel latent class model, a hierarchical clustering method. A general important observation is that having no workers dedicated to green jobs is strongly correlated to the probability of adopting resource-efficiency practices, while perceiving the need of extra environmental skills has a positive effect on the intention to implement actions in the future. Other characteristics of the firms play a significant impact on resource efficiency: in general, older and bigger firms, with larger yearly turnover, are more prone to implement actions.
Highlights
The idea of sustainability was born only a few decades ago, due to the evidence of diminishing natural resources, climate change, and increasing environmental degradation.These facts induced industries to pay attention to appropriate management of environmental impacts of their actions
We report the results of two multilevel Latent class (LC) analyses that have been conducted on the data (Model estimation was performed with Latent Gold (Vermunt and Magidson [53]))
The first model aimed at identifying groups of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that are homogeneous for the number and type of resource-efficiency actions already undertaken
Summary
The idea of sustainability was born only a few decades ago, due to the evidence of diminishing natural resources, climate change, and increasing environmental degradation These facts induced industries to pay attention to appropriate management of environmental impacts of their actions. As Bayeh and Workie [2] showed, average world temperature is at least one degree Celsius higher than in the preindustrial era and this is due, according to 97% of climate experts, to emission of gasses resulting from human activities This evidence has become even clearer during the recent COVID-19 pandemic: many papers have already been published on the possible link between the diffusion of the virus and environmental pollution (Gupta et al [3]). The 9Rs framework proposes ten actions that transform a linear production system into a circular one, from R0—refuse—to
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