EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

E-Retailers and Environmental Sustainability

Peter Jones, Daphne Comfort and David Hillier

International Journal of Management and Sustainability, 2014, vol. 3, issue 7, 457-468

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to offer an exploratory review of the extent to which the world’s leading e-retailers are communicating the environmental impact of their business and their environmental sustainability agendas to their customers. The paper draws its empirical material from the most recent information on environmental sustainability posted on the world’s leading e-retailers’ corporate web sites. The findings reveal that the majority of the world’s leading e-retailers publicly report on their commitment to environmental sustainability which embraces climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency, waste management, water management, bio-diversity and nature conservation. However the authors argue that these commitments can be interpreted as being driven as much by business imperatives and the search for efficiency gains as by any genuine commitment to environmental sustainability and that they are couched within existing business models centred on continuing growth. As such E-retailers are currently pursuing a ‘weak’ rather than a ‘strong’ model of sustainability.

Keywords: Sustainability; E-retailers; Sustainable consumption; Business models; Efficiency; External assurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://archive.conscientiabeam.com/index.php/11/article/view/976/1351 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pkp:ijomas:v:3:y:2014:i:7:p:457-468:id:976

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Management and Sustainability from Conscientia Beam
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dim Michael ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:pkp:ijomas:v:3:y:2014:i:7:p:457-468:id:976