Circular Economy and Corporate Social Responsibility

Dear Colleagues,

In 1994, John Elkington published the concept of the Triple Bottom Line in The Economist, a concept that determines that companies must produce and provide services based on the following parameters: on the one hand, they must obtain benefits, (profit), and, on the other hand, they must take into account the opinions of society (people) and configure their strategy based on these opinions and they must also consider the negative externalities that production and the provision of services generate in the environment (Planet).

In this sense, the corporate social responsibility is constituted as an instrument of business management that can face the different challenges that the organizations have in economic and environmental reality with negative externalities, including climate change generated by the model of the linear economy.

CSR is characterized by the fact that all stakeholders must join efforts with the aim of reducing, mitigating, and eliminating them in order to generate a new model of sustainable economic growth and a large part of the various actions of CSR has to do with projects related to sustainable development that the UN in 1987 proposed that sustainability as the ability to meet the needs of the current human generation without jeopardizing the needs of future generations.

The circular economy, a paradigm that implies that it is possible to produce in a different way, propagates a change of model and technologies of production and a productive system that is capable of generating a restorative and regenerative model of production and provision of services. This relies on renewable energies to reduce and mitigate the negative externalities of climatic change, environmental toxicity, and to improve biodiversity.  The circular economy focuses on the effective and efficient management of what are called technological nutrients under the management of R:

Rethink, Redesign, Recycle Reduce, Repair, Renew, Recover, Reuse

In this sense, we propose that researchers send us articles where they relate aspects and topics of CSR and EC, where they highlight that there are relationships of management variables and how the triple bottom line (TBL) strategies are designed in different organizations. In addition, it would be interesting to know how, from different points of view of the organizations, procedures of traceability and monitoring are being established to know how the processes are being carried out under the paradigm of the circular economy.

Prof. Valentín Molina-Moreno
Prof. Dr. Juan Victor Meseguer Sánchez
Guest Editors

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• Triple bottom line
• CSR
• shared value
• 17 SDG/ODS
• circular economy
• social awareness
• social-environmental reports
• case studies
• Bcorp Company
• shared value
• performance indicators KPI
• corporate social responsibility
• green economy
• Millennium goals
• socially responsible companies
• carbon footprint
• water footprint
• plastic footprint
• reverse logistics chain
• logistics chain
• environmental awareness
• university corporate social responsibility
• green technologies
• personal social responsibility