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The aim of this research is to explore how social housing associations can introduce circular strategies and integrate social elements, next to ecological elements, within these strategies. In order to investigate this aim, this paper first explores the circular strategy options that can be adopted by housing associations. Thereafter, the paper explores how social elements can be integrated within these strategies via the establishment of relationships with communities in the network of housing associations. By performing an in-depth case study, we identified potential circular strategies for housing associations and indicate how community relationships could be established within these strategies. The findings highlight that community relationships in the vision formulation and activities involved in the execution of circular strategies may assist in creating synergies between the ecological aims of circular strategies and the perspectives and needs of communities. On the other hand, the results indicate that not establishing relationships with communities or only establishing relationships in the strategy outcomes may be detrimental to both community needs and the ecological aims of circular strategies. ? 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

In international scientific literature, it is argued from institutional theory that economic freedom stimulates corporate environmental responsibility. However, economic freedom comprises several different dimensions, such as government size, rule of law, open markets, and (freedom from) government regulation. Whereas previous literature has shown that rule of law and open markets stimulate corporate environmental responsibility, the impact of government size and government regulation on corporate environmental responsibility of companies located in different countries has yet not been explored. This paper contributes to scientific literature by researching the effects of these two dimensions of economic freedom on corporate environmental responsibility. We hypothesize that small government stimulates corporate environmental responsibility and that freedom from government regulation discourages it. Using panel data from ASSET4 for the corporate environmental responsibility of 5023 companies, and data of government size and government regulation from Fraser Institute and Heritage Foundation for 41 countries, the authors perform panel analysis for the period 2005–2014 to test the hypotheses. The estimation results show that both small size of government and freedom from government regulation decrease corporate environmental responsibility. The test results are robust for the type of economic freedom data (Fraser Institute or Heritage Foundation) used.

Existing empirical and theoretical literature provides excellent insight into many aspects of CEO-related phenomena. However, so far, no study has explored the interrelation between corporate governance and CEO ability in influencing corporate social responsibility practices. From resource-based view perspectives, this research examines the complementarities/substitutions that may exist between social responsibility oriented corporate governance mechanisms and CEO ability in affecting corporate social responsibility performance among United States firms. This research documents that CEO ability is a unique resource that can help firms reduce agency problem associated with social and environmental performance. The analysis of data for the period of 2006–2015 reveals several fact-based findings. This research finds strong complementarities between CEO ability and internal social responsibility oriented governance mechanisms (i.e., board independence, the presence of a sustainability committee, and social performance-related incentives for managers) in enhancing socially responsible performance within a firm. Conventionally, it is considered that CEOs are less likely to engage in socially responsible activities, while findings of this paper shed light on the brighter side of CEO ability.

This paper focuses on the potential impact of various options for decarbonization of public bus transport in Stockholm, with particular attention to electrification. An optimization model is used to locate electric bus chargers and to estimate the associated carbon emissions, using a life cycle perspective and various implementation scenarios. Emissions associated with fuels and batteries of electric powertrains are considered to be the two main factors affecting carbon emissions. The results show that, although higher battery capacities could help electrify more routes of the city's bus network, this does not necessarily lead to a reduction of the total emissions. The results show the lowest life cycle emissions occurring when electric buses use batteries with a capacity of 120 kWh. The fuel choices significantly influence the environmental impact of a bus network. For example, the use of electricity is a better choice than first generation biofuels from a carbon emission perspective. However, the use of second-generation biofuels, such as Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO), can directly compete with the Nordic electricity mix. Among all fuel options, certified renewable electricity has the lowest impact. The analysis also shows that electrification could be beneficial for reduction of local pollutants in the Stockholm inner city; however, the local emissions of public transport are much lower than emissions from private transport.

Value creation and appropriation are much-studied processes in business and management fields. However, both academia and business practice have traditionally focused on how value is created and appropriated in the economic context and by economic actors. This overemphasis on economic logic has created institutionalized asymmetries in managing the relationship between business, society and ecological environment. In this paper, we broaden the value creation and appropriation analysis along two dimensions: (1) the type of economic goods used to create value (private and club goods, public goods and common goods) and (2) value creation and appropriation domains (economic, social, and environmental). Building on this framework, we argue that there are several institutionalized asymmetries in the relationship between the goods used to create value and the domains in which the value is eventually appropriated. We point out the system-level tendency of value over-appropriation in the economic domain over the two other domains as well as value over-appropriation in the social domain over the environmental domain. We also discuss how existing organizational practices, such as corporate social responsibility, shared value creation, and sustainable business models, have attempted to overcome them, and reflect on the main critiques to these approaches. Finally, we identify potential business-based solutions to the institutionalized asymmetries and provide implications to research and practice. Post-print / Final draft

China’s strategy of greening industrial development aims to decouple industrial growth from industrial wastewater discharges (IWDs). This study combines decoupling analysis, decomposition analysis, and attribution analysis to support this goal. First, the decoupling analysis is employed to explore the degree of decoupling between industrial growth and IWDs in China, as well as across 30 provinces, from 2000 to 2015. Next, a decomposition analysis focusing on the change in industrial wastewater discharge intensity (IWDI) is performed to reveal the factors influencing decoupling trends. Then, attribution analysis is used to attribute contributions of these factors to different regions. Our decoupling results indicate an increasing decoupling trend between industrial output and IWDs in China in the past 15 years. Meanwhile, there is a convergence in decoupling degrees among provinces. Decomposition results reveal that water intensity plays a dominant role in promoting decoupling, while the wastewater discharge coefficient negatively impacted decoupling before 2005 but contributed to decoupling later on. Regional attribution results indicate provinces in South China have exerted more efforts in both water saving and wastewater treatment during the study period. Water scarce provinces in North China performed better in terms of water saving, while more developed and water-rich provinces in South China performed better in wastewater treatment. This paper suggests targeted policy methods at province level.

High energy consumption is one of the main challenges of the chemical industry. The energy footprint of most processes can, however, diminish through the solutions presented in the current paper, leading to cleaner ways of producing chemicals. Ethylene production process is selected as a case study to demonstrate the approach as it is one of the most energy consuming processes in the chemical industry. The study involves an exergetic diagnosis and does not only find the low-exergy-efficient unit operations, but also proposes tools to improve these units based on their key sources of irreversibility. For the ethylene production process, this is conducted by first splitting the flowsheet into four main functional blocks (namely cracking, compression, refrigeration, and separation and purification) according to their exergy losses. This results in identifying the cracking block as the most inefficient block with more than 45% of total exergy losses and thus the first block to be improved so that overall losses reduce (examples of which include increasing the number of furnace tubes while reducing their lengths). Although the compression block is-found to have the lowest contribution to internal exergy losses, the inefficient unit operations such as the water cooler (with an exergy loss of 214 4J/kg) can still be improved through solutions such as system isolation. The refrigeration block is also shown to have the second highest exergy losses with its ethylene and propylene compressors being the main contributors. Solutions are again provided to improve the block performance with specific focus on intercooler design improvement and system isolation. Finally, exergy losses in the purification and separation block are identified to be mainly due to demethanator, deethanator, and ethylene column where modifications in column design might be helpful as concentration and temperature gradients along the towers are the main sources of exergy losses. The approach used in the current study can also be applied to other chemical processes and the findings suggest that even for a well-developed process technology, there is still opportunity for thermodynamically justifiable energy efficiency improvements. Therefore, it is important for process developers to continuously revisit existing processes, in order to ensure lessons learned in one area can be applied to another one. Using a panel of solutions, which has been constructed from a number of previous case studies helps to make this approach more systematic and user-friendly. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.