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- Sustainability (32) (remove)
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Sustainability is a megatrend and has been a topic of great interest for decades. Even though, industrialization came forth with genius and profitable businesses it almost never took into consideration the value of natural capital and sustainability. According to a 2017 report by the UN, there are more than 51 trillion microplastic particles in the sea, more than 500 times the number of stars in the Milky Way. With the depletion of natural resources, increasing consumer education and the need for a better future the world has been prompted to take solid steps to control the menace that could be climate change and unsustainability. This paper makes an effort to understand the effect that sustainable marketing practices have on the profitability of an organization. The case studies of the three famous athleisure brands provides an insight into how sustainability can help companies drive towards a profitable and a circular future.
Greenwashing in the clothing industry and its impact on the corporate image of consumers in Germany
(2023)
With issues like climate change and the pollution of our planet, more and more clothing companies are following the trend of a sustainable marketing strategy. Greenwashing is often associated with that, as not all companies are honest about their statements. This study examines how greenwashing by a company in the clothing industry impacts the corporate image of 18 to 30-year-old adults in Germany. Studies regarding sustainability, consumer behaviour towards sustainable products, the behaviour in case of greenwashing incidents, and the identification of greenwashing are investigated. For the analysis, online survey data of 244 Hochschule Furtwangen University study participants are examined. The descriptive study provides information about the behaviour of consumers regarding sustainable clothing and their behaviour when it comes to greenwashing. It was found that consumers tend not to consider sustainability when buying clothes. Very few inform themselves about sustainability, and sustainable labels do not seem to influence their shopping decisions. The image of the consumer about the company involved in greenwashing appears to deteriorate. In addition, the willingness to keep buying from the company seems to be stopped or reduced for the majority. A weak positive correlation was found between consumer behaviour concerning the topics of sustainability and greenwashing. It can be summarised that the dishonest behaviour of clothing companies can harm their consumers' corporate image and brand loyalty.
Diese Arbeit untersucht die Auswirkungen der „Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive“ auf mittelständische Unternehmen und zeigt mögliche Herausforderungen bei ihrer Umsetzung auf. Bei der „Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive“ handelt es sich um die neue Richtlinie der Europäischen Union zur Nachhaltigkeitsberichterstattung von Unternehmen. Diese Richtlinie erhöht die Nachhaltigkeitsberichterstattungsanforderungen an Unternehmen erheblich, qualitativ sowie quantitativ. Die Berichterstattung muss deutlich tiefgründiger sein als bisher und auch die absolute Anzahl an berichtspflichtigen Unternehmen ist deutlich gestiegen, wodurch u.a. auch mittelständische Unternehmen, sofern sie kapitalmarktorientiert sind, zum ersten Mal betroffen sind. Um dabei auf mögliche Herausforderungen bei der Umsetzung aufmerksam zu machen, wurde ein Experteninterview mit einem Unternehmen aus der Region geführt. Die Auswertung des Gesprächs zeigt, dass zusätzlicher Arbeitsaufwand und fehlende Expertise zur Nachhaltigkeitsberichterstellung die größten Herausforderungen sind.
For many practitioners, considering sustainability during a software development project is a challenge. The Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) is a tool for thinking through short, medium-and long-term impacts of socio-technical systems on its surrounding environment. While SusAF has been used by several companies, is not widely adopted in industry yet. In this Vision Paper, we discuss the options for extending the reach of SusAF and what it would take to evolve SusAF into a (de-facto) standard
Sustainability first caught greater attention when the Brundtland commission first published their report “Our Common Future”. Since then, a lot has been done to fight against climate change. Sustainability has become one major issue in the daily business of companies. One industry that is surely going to change as a cause of the increased awareness of sustainability issues is the automotive industry. The disruptive electrification push plays an important role in the fast changing industry. E- mobility solutions as a means for more sustainable mobility are demanded more and more by customers. Also, governments shape the change in the industry with new regulations, bonus payments for buying electric cars and their emission targets. All this might sooner or later push traditional combustion engine cars out of the market. New players like Tesla focusing only on electric vehicles are entering the market and traditional car companies are changing their business towards e-mobility as well. That this change works well, companies also will need a well-developed marketing as well as brand positioning strategy and this is where the concept of green marketing kicks in. Broadly spoken, green marketing is the marketing of products that minimize the negative effects on our environment. Therefore, the thesis is generally researching the details of literature on green marketing and brand positioning. Later on, a detailed transition to the automotive industry is made with the analyzing of the three companies Volkswagen, BMW and Tesla. The thesis works out how those three companies managed to transfer their marketing mix into a green one and how this then affected their brand positioning. The thesis discusses the findings critically and gives implications for theory and practice as well as a guide to what needs to be done to be recognized as a green player in the automotive industry.
Key factors sustainability and digitalization – an analysis of countries performance and actions
(2022)
Climate change is an extremely relevant topic nowadays in everyday life, politics and even economy. Therefore, it is important to understand the dimension of this topic and be conscious about how it is affecting everyone’s life. Many people’s base of living is fading through for example crop failure or natural disasters. Next, businesses must also adapt since many governments have implemented emission caps which force organizations to restructure business processes to meet those goals. Adapting to new circumstances or ways of working is crucial to fight back menacing environmental changes and without coherent enforcement, the goal of combating global warming and tackling climate change can’t be achieved.
But how can these challenges be fought against in a meaningful way and matter in a long-term perspective? There were already some attempts made like setting a maximum for global warming worldwide. On the other hand, there is no country which can meet those in the required period of time. Next to battle the problem of global warming every country in the world has to take part and work together, or else the goals can’t be fulfilled, which can occur to be difficult and hard to execute in reality. If there is no coherency in enforcement the aim of fighting the global warming and climate change can’t be attained.
The essential query I want to obtain with this thesis is what the possibilities for countries through sustainability and digitalization to live and operate in a more renewable way are. Part of this work will be assessing Sweden’s progress and development in this field since they are pioneers in both key areas. Afterwards there will be a comparison to Morocco and Singapore which at first glance differ completely from each other to work out differences and common ground.
In the end contrasting key factors like climate and geography, politics or economy etc. will give insights about opportunities and unused potential in making the world more sustainable with the help of digitalization.
The technique of acquiring the data is mainly focused on news articles, tech, and business publications as well as governmental proclamation and reporting of environmental portals. The reasoning for this is that the topic is very up to date and the source of information needs to be as recent as possible.
The intention of the project is to generate understanding and awareness about how sustainability and digitalization can be drivers and work together in a complex sphere like environmental change.
Software engineering, as a central practice of digitalization, needs to become accountable for sustainability. In light of the ecological crises and the tremendous impact of digital systems on reshaping economic and social arrangements - often with negative side-effects - we need a sustainability transformation of the digital transformation. However, this is a complex and long-term task. In this article we combine an analysis of accountability arrangements in software engineering and a model of sustainability transformations to trace how certain dynamics are starting to make software engineering accountable for sustainability in the technological, cultural, economic and governance domains. The article discusses existing approaches for sustainable software engineering and software engineering for sustainability, traces emerging discourses that connect digitalization and sustainability, highlights new digital business models that may support sustainability and shows governance efforts to highlight “green and digital” policy problems. Yet, we argue that these are so far niche dynamics and that a sustainability transformation requires a collective and long-lasting effort to engender systemic changes. The goal should be to create varied accountability arrangements for sustainability in software engineering which is embedded in complex ways in society and economy.
Abstract
The large-scale impact of the climate change on all regions and industries of the world underlines the need for action in the logistics sector. Despite literature in this field has matured fast since the last 5 years, it neglects the consideration of digital tools or measures to introduce sustainability in the sector. Consequently, precise recommendations on how to manage digital disruptions in order to reach sustainability goals in Logistics are lacking.
The objective of this thesis is to develop those recommendations and to facilitate their implementation for practitioners in the truck container transportation sector. To do so, the impact as well as the evolution of digitalization must be determined. Besides, factors for managing digital change successfully and measuring their impact in this sector shall be ascertained. Finally, a holistic framework to support the implementation process for becoming more sustainable by using digitalization should be presented.
A single-case study at the Logistics Start-Up “driveMybox” intends to fill the identified gap in knowledge. Particularly, it is studied how the organization manages to use digital tools to offer CO2-neutral truck container transports on their platform. Thereby, the different approaches are being looked at. Besides, data is gathered through qualitative interviews and other internal documents.
The first outcome of the thesis is an overview that illustrates the role of digitalization in Logistics. It increases the awareness of the digital impact and helps practitioners to take useful actions. Furthermore, a clear set of success factors to forward sustainability in the transportation sector was developed. Finally, a holistic result depicts which steps can lead to a more sustainable transportation process. Summarising, the thesis contributes to extant literature by combining digitalization with approaches to sustainability. The given recommendations consider the particularities of Start-Ups and support practitioners in this field with valuable guidelines and a holistic framework.