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This article examines the growth of the waste and recycling sector in Sweden since the 1970s and seeks to identify the conditions for market growth and underlying business dynamics. The article identifies a slow growth pattern at aggregate level in the 1970s, while a major shift toward higher growth rates took place only in the mid-1990s. Resembling the findings of existing studies of German and US industry counterparts, Swedish recycling companies grew larger in the 1970s and more knowledge-intensive from the 1980s. Our study concludes that the growth of the Swedish recycling industry has been driven not only by government policies addressing household waste but even more so by large manufacturing firms that have increasingly demanded more complex recycling services over time.

The paper analyzes the prerequisites for a regulatory-driven transition toward radically lower air and water pollution in industry. This is achieved in the empirical context of the Swedish mining and metals industry, and by investigating the environmental licensing processes during two regulatory systems. The paper derives an analytical framework that explores under what circumstances such licensing processes can result in radical emissions reductions without seriously jeopardizing the competitiveness of the industry. Archived material covering six environmental licensing processes, three during each system, is used to illustrate the various design and implementation issues. The results suggest that regulatory-driven green transitions benefit from trust-based bargaining procedures in which companies are involved in repeated interactions with regulatory authorities, and which extended probation periods permit tests of novel abatement technologies (including innovation). The findings also illustrate the importance of abstaining from simplified normative notions about policy instrument choice (e.g. taxes versus standards).

This special issue is concerned with new approaches in business history to exploration of the role of business in both creating and addressing the mounting environmental crisis that has become apparent over the last half century. Two decades have passed sinceBusiness History Reviewpublished a pioneering special issue on business and the natural environment. The guest editors of that issue, Christine Rosen and Christopher Sellers, called for an “ecocultural approach” to business history and noted that strikingly little attention had been given to the issue of business and the natural environment in the field.

This article examines key barriers to business sustainability discussed at a multidisciplinary conference held at the Harvard Business School in 2018. Drawing on perspectives from both the historical and business literatures, speakers debated the historical success of and future opportunities for voluntary business actions to advance sustainability. Roadblocks include misaligned incentives, missing institutions, inertia of economic systems, and the concept of sustainability itself. Overcoming these roadblocks will require systematic interventions and alternative normative concepts.

Although the automobile industry has served as the backbone of much business history scholarship, business historians have paid little attention to this industry’s actions concerning the complex of environmental issues that took hold in the 1960s. Volvo represents a captivating case study to gain insight into why the automobile industry’s growth has been difficult to align with the shift toward environmental sustainability. Although Volvo pioneered the exhaust emission control technology on the U.S. market in the 1970s and gained an international reputation for high environmental and safety standards in the decades that followed, the company was unable to seriously address climate change in the 1990s. This article identifies several key factors impacting the automobile industry’s passive response to environmental challenges—for instance, weak and asymmetric emission control regulations on international markets, consumer preferences for larger cars (SUVs) in the 1990s, and a lack of systematic regulatory pressure to shift from fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine. In the case of Volvo, world leadership in safety standards, rather than low carbon emissions, constituted the company’s competitive advantage as climate change emerged as one of the most critical environmental issues in the 1990s.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the development paths leading to the transition to cleaner bleaching technologies in the pulp industry. It devotes particular attention to the key features o ...

This study examines how the Swedish insurance company Ansvar established and expended an international business from the 1930s to the 1990s with the motives to insure total abstainers while battlin ...

Purpose of Review In this article, we review existing research addressing how environmental regulations have influenced the pulp and paper industry. These regulations appear in different forms and designs and address air and water pollution as well as climate change. The paper devotes particular attention to how various regulations have affected sustainable technological change and the prospects for inducing deep emission reductions without jeopardizing industrial competitiveness and future investments. Recent Findings Experiences from key pulp and paper regions, not least the Nordic countries, suggest that gradually tightening performance standards have contributed to radical reductions in emissions, e.g., chlorine compounds and biological oxygen demanding agents, and without imposing excessive compliance costs. This outcome can largely be attributed to how the regulations have been designed—and implemented—in practice, as well as to the presence of efficient and legitimate institutions. Long-term emission reduction targets, in combination with extended compliance periods and trustful firm-regulator relationships, contributed to radical technological innovation and permitted radical emission reductions without excessive compliance costs. The development of alternative bleaching technologies is an apt example. In contrast, the impact of carbon pricing schemes, including the EU emissions trading scheme, on carbon dioxide emissions reductions and related technological change in the pulp and paper industry has however been modest. Self-regulation, certification, and community pressure have exerted relatively modest influences on the environmental performance of the industry. Summary Important avenues for future research are identified. These include the following: (a) comparative research on how policy mixes in various countries have influenced environmental compliance and innovation; processes; (b) future studies of environmental regulations, their design and implementation, in emerging pulp and paper producing countries, not least China; and (c) research on how environmental regulations can affect ongoing restructurings in the industry towards a broader palette of products in biorefineries.

This study of the Swedish-based mining company Boliden examines the proactive strategies it adopted to deal with the potential for severe environmental problems associated with the establishment of its large copper smelter in the 1920s. The article demonstrates how international networks, personal experience, and knowledge transfer from the U.S. copper industry help to explain the importance given to environmental issues by the Swedish industrialists. It is suggested that the main explanation for the proactive stance of the Swedish managers is that they perceived excessive pollution as working against creating a profitable and sustainable business. This case provides compelling evidence that firms pursuing an agenda focused on earning profits can still deliver environmental innovation and value to the local community, compatible with the concept of creating shared value.

The interrelation between capitalism and its overall destructive impact on the natural environment has never been a central subject among business and economic historians. Rather, the big debates h...

Although the dioxin alarm broke at the same time in Sweden and the US in the mid-1980s, Swedish pulp and paper (P&P) firms led the way towards the new market for low-chlorine and chlorine-free ...

This working paper provides a long-term business history perspective on sustainability. For a long time, the central issues in business history concerned how business enterprises innovated and crea ...

This paper addresses the issue of environmental policy instrument choice for achieving deep emission reductions in the industrial sector. Specifically, it provides: (a) a theoretical and empirical ...

This study examines the historical relation between carbon dioxide emission and output growth in the Swedish pulp and paper industry from 1973 to 2006. We find that the industry achieved an 80 perc ...

Organizational networks had a strong influence on the diffusion of green knowledge within the Swedish pulp-and-paper industry from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. The environmental adaptations made by this industrial sector were not merely the result of a corporate initiative or of the response by firms or industries to environmental regulation. An examination of the innovation-system approach that was used to further the industry's environmental goals reveals that the knowledge and technology development underpinning the project depended on a network of diverse actors. Within this network, the semi-governmental Institute for Water and Air Protection, working with a consulting company, was a critical generator and intermediary of knowledge. Thus, the success of the project was largely due to the Institute's balanced relations with government and industry.

The new estimates of the Maddison Project show that GDP per capita ratio at purchasing power parity (ppp) between Bolivia and Finland has changed from 0.68 ca. 1850 to 0.16 in 2015; similarly, that between Chile and Norway from 0.65 to 0.28. The aim of this article is to present a review of the literature and available quantitative evidence to understand how these extreme differences became possible between countries with similarly enormous natural resource endowments. Specifically, the article seeks to: (a) identify some stylized facts that may help understand the divergence between Andean and Nordic countries; (b) identify key historical processes that explain the divergent effect of natural resource abundance in Andean and Nordic economies. In order to achieve these objectives, four topics are covered: GDPpc, population, trade and taxation. The analysis comprises three Nordic countries (Finland, Norway and Sweden) and three Andean countries (Bolivia, Chile and Peru) from the mid-Nineteenth Century to present day. The sample size, time span covered and thematic approach provide new evidence regarding previous work.

We examine the historical developments of the environmental adaptation process at one Swedish metal smelting firm, contrasting the result with cases in Canada. The findings suggest that the Swedish ...

This paper examines the transition towards renewable energy in the Swedish pulp and paper industry (PPI) during the 1970s and -80s. In the wake of the first Oil Crisis until the late 1980s, the use of fossil fuels was reduced by 70 percent in this sector. The lion’s share of the reduction was achieved by substituting oil by biofuels in terms of rest products from the pulp manufacturing process. The reduction was made possible also by efficiency improvements and increased internal production of electricity through back-pressure turbine power generation. Sweden was highly dependent on oil when the first Oil Crisis broke, and the run up in oil prices put pressure on the Swedish government and the energy intensive PPI to reduce dependency. Of central importance for the transition to be implemented was a highly collaborative strategy of the sector as well as between the sector and the corporatist Swedish state administration. The Swedish government chose a proactive strategy by emphasizing knowledge management and collaboration with industry along with the substitution of oil with biofuels. The transition was further fueled by the fact that focus was directed towards unutilized potentials in the sector, where a previous waste problem now could be transformed into energy savings, i.e., the strong version of the Porter hypothesis. Also energy taxes and fees played a major role as control agents in the Swedish energy policy of the 1970s and 80s. Thus, the study illustrates the central role of governments and their ability to push industries into new technological paths through a wide palette of interplaying policy instruments. The study further points at the importance of a more holistic understanding of the interplay between different policies and impacts in the longer run.

This paper addresses the issue of environmental policy instrument choice for achieving deep emissions reductions in the industrial sector. Specifically, it provides: (a) a theoretical review of the conditions under which performance standards can provide efficient incentives for environmental compliance and innovation; and (b) an analysis of the design and the outcomes of the standards-based regulation of industrial pollutants in Sweden during the period 1970- 1990. The empirical findings suggest that the Swedish regulatory approach comprised many key elements of an efficient policy-induced transition towards radically lower emissions in the metal smelting and pulp and paper industries. The regulation relied heavily on performance standards, thus granting flexibility to firms in terms of selecting the appropriate compliance measures, and the standards were implemented in combination with extended probation periods. R&D projects and the new knowledge that was advanced incrementally in interaction between the company, the environmental authorities and the research institutions provided a direct catalyst to the regulatory process. As such the Swedish regulatory approach provided scope for creative solutions, environmental innovation, and permitted the affected firms to coordinate pollution prevention measures with productive investments.

This study examines the historical relation between carbon dioxide emission and output growth in the Swedish pulp and paperindustry 1973-2006. We find that the industry achieved an 80 per cent reduction in CO2 emission. Foremost energy substitution but also efficiently improvement contributed to the reduction. Growing prices of fossil fuel due to market price change and taxes and subvention, explains most of the efficiency improvements and substitution. Taxes on energy explain 40 per cent of the total reduction in CO2 intensity. Most of the reduction took place before the implementation of active climate policy in 1991.