The pursuit of sustainable development is not only a moral responsibility, but also the key to long-term success for businesses. In times of climate crisis and growing customer and investor expectations, companies must take active steps to reduce their impact on the environment. The transformation towards a circular economy (CE) is becoming a priority, offering numerous business benefits such as cost reduction, reputation improvement and increased innovation. These are the conclusions of our latest study " Circular Economy Businesses: A Detailed Analysis". .

.... significant most companies want to implement sustainable initiatives or have already started the process? Such declarations were made by 71.1 to 84.9% managers representing medium and large companies from 6 European countries. The increase in public awareness of lifestyles and consumption patterns is causing businesses, institutions and government bodies to recognise the need for an inevitable change in strategy and to adopt new
direction.

Process efficiency is the main driver of implementing sustainable initiatives, followed by communication considerations and the company's image in the eyes of stakeholders. Taking these motivations into account, the rest of the analysis focused on a group of companies selected due to the type of sustainable initiatives they undertake. For this purpose, an in-depth analysis was carried out, which showed that the most common practice is the verification of compliance of the conducted activities with environmental protection regulations (72% of companies).

Understood in this way, limiting the impact of a company's activities on the environment is a valuable competitive advantage. Among the actions taken to achieve this goal, respondents most often declared reducing emissions, optimizing waste management, avoiding plastic, eco-designing packaging and developing an effective ESG strategy.