A forest companies typology regarding their contribution to circular economy: a sustainability reporting-based analysis

Abstract

Abstract Relatively recently, the residuals of forest industry have been considered very important and useful to be reused through bioeconomy and circular economy practices in order to reduce the use of non-renewable natural resources. The majority of current studies have been based on interview protocols and questionnaire-based surveys to examine how managers of forest industry contribute to sustainable development and circular economy. Despite the usefulness of these surveys, there is a degree of subjectivity in the respondents' responses and an orientation to what forest companies propose to do in the circular economy. To overcome the weaknesses of previous research, this paper aims at drawing appropriate information from sustainability reporting of a sample of forest companies to provide a more unambiguous understanding of the way that forest companies meet the circular economy principles. Thus, a circular economy measurement framework is developed which is based on scoring systems and GRI guidelines to draw reliable and harmonized information from corporate sustainability reporting. Furthermore, it results in a four-type company typology according to the number of the circular economy principles and the number of items they achieve for each principle such as pioneer circular company, lagging circular company, innovative circular company and infant circular company. The suggested framework is tested on a sample of 20 forest companies with higher revenue in 2022. The findings show that half of the sampled companies can be considered as infants at the CE practices, while a positive statistical relationship is revealed between forest companies’ circular economy practices and their revenues.

Keywords

• Forest circular economy
• Bioeconomy
• Forest industry
• Circular economy principles
• GRI
• Sustainability