Waste, Recycling and Entrepreneurship in Central and Northern Europe, 1870-1940
Geoffrey G. Jones () and
Andrew Spadafora ()
Additional contact information
Geoffrey G. Jones: Harvard Business School, General Management Unit
Andrew Spadafora: Harvard Business School
No 14-084, Harvard Business School Working Papers from Harvard Business School
Abstract:
This working paper examines the role of entrepreneurs in the municipal solid waste industry in industrialized central and northern Europe from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. It explores the emergence of numerous German, Danish and other European entrepreneurial firms explicitly devoted to making a profitable business out of conserving and returning valuable resources to productive use, while maintaining public sanitation and in many cases offering nascent environmental protections. These ventures were qualitatively different from both earlier small-scale private waste traders, and the late twentieth-century integrated waste management firms, and have been neglected in an era that historians have treated as a period of municipalization. These entrepreneurs sometimes had strikingly modern views of environmental challenges and the need to overcome them. They initiated processes for sorting and recycling waste materials that are still employed today. Yet it proved difficult to combine making profits and achieving social value in accordance with the "shared value" model of today. As providers of public goods such as health and sanitation and a cleaner environment the entrepreneurs were often unable to capture sufficient profits to sustain businesses. Recycled-goods markets were volatile. There was also a tension between the constant waste stream on the collection side and a seasonal/cyclical demand for recycled products. The frequent failure of these businesses helps to explain why in more recent decades private waste companies have been associated with late entry into recycling, often trailing municipal governments and non-profit entities.
Keywords: Environmental Entrepreneurship, business history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 70 pages
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-ent, nep-env, nep-his, nep-res and nep-sbm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/pages/download.aspx?name=14-084.pdf (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:hbs:wpaper:14-084
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Harvard Business School Working Papers from Harvard Business School Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by HBS ().