Environmental Sustainability and Firm Performance

The presence and magnitude of business opportunities via becoming more environmentally sustainable is expected to vary greatly between firms. This study examines these differences by analysing the interaction effect of firm characteristics and sustainability on the dependent variable profit development. There are no negative relationships found between the sustainability proxy and the profit development of the firm, in fact, a significant positive relationships is detected. Furthermore, only a few interaction effects were found. Firms that communicate within the company about their sustainability efforts, and doing process innovation perform relatively better in terms of profit development. Furthermore, the results from this sample indicate that communicating towards the costumers about their sustainability efforts is especially beneficial for firms producing computer and electronics related products and companies producing electronically equipment and machinery. Given the exploratory purpose of this paper, additional research is advised in order to further interpret these results.