From greenwashing to ESG‐washing: A focus on the circular economy field

Abstract

In the field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) today, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors play a fundamental and increasingly central role in the evaluation of corporate performance worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the recent phenomenon of ESG issues has given rise to a new form of greenwashing in a broad sense, not limited to the environmental sphere, but also extended to social and governance issues. The paper examines whether companies engaged in the transition to sustainable and in particular to circular models are actually focusing on concrete sustainable actions and less on distorted communication. Specifically, ESG performance measures were collected for 366 companies from the most impactful industries in different countries around the world to test the relationships between ESG performance, adoption of circular economy models and ‘washing’ practices related to stakeholder communication. As the transition to sustainable and circular models requires not only substantive action but also transparency, further research and efforts are needed to better understand the relationship between these elements in corporate behavior.