The programming committee for the 78th Annual SAM International Business Conference is pleased to announce the acceptance of the presentation Agenda 2030 And The Circular Economy: Motivating Employees To Embrace The Challenge by Veronika Humphries and Bruce Walker from the University of Louisiana Monroe.
Presentation Abstract: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development under the auspice of the United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security includes the novel idea of implementing a circular economy approach to ensure inclusive and sustainable economic development. Changing the current linear economy that anticipates the end-of-life of each product into a more sustainable circular economy, when the three Rs of reduce, reuse, recycle create a different meaning. The implementation of this relatively new paradigm is in its various stages in the United States and the European Union. Although the circular economy is widely researched in Europe and Asia, the United States seems to lag far behind. In 2011, China had already implemented aspects of circular economy into its national plan. Following the European Strategy on Plastics of 2018 and the European Green Deal of 2019, in March 2020, the European Union implemented the Circular Economy Action Plan. In September of 2021, the Congressional Committee on Environment and Public Works of the US Senate held a hearing on “The Circular Economy as a Concept for Creating a More Sustainable Future,” advocating for the implementation of this worthwhile endeavor. One possible reason why the United States is lagging behind China and Europe might be due to a lack of clarity in terms of what a circular economy is, resulting in confusion among a firm’s employees regarding how to approach and ultimately embrace the concept. This paper will discuss specifically how a firm might motivate or entice employees to embrace the idea of a circular economy to explore and identify specific actions that can be taken to begin this process within a firm. This will include discussions of basic circular economy definitions, the controversy in the U.S. concerning the idea of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing, and possible tools that might be used to encourage employees to embrace the concept. Employee Development and Organizational Change literature databases will be explored as part of this paper..
Join us online or in person at SAMIBC 2023 and see this great presentation and many more March 13 – March 18, 2023. For registration information visit www.samnational.org/conference.