Green Innovation and Business Sustainability: New Evidence from Energy Intensive Industry in China

Chinese manufacturing has recently undertaken the responsibility of energy conservation and emission reduction to address climate change. This research analyzes green innovation on business sustainability in the energy-intensive industry in China from the manager perspective, researched data from 229 Chinese managers via structural equation modeling (SEM). The results demonstrated that green innovation had three dimensions: green product innovation, recycling, and green publicity. Business sustainability also had three dimensions: financial performance, environmental performance, and social performance. It also shows that green innovation had a significant effect on business sustainability in the energy-intensive industry. More specifically, we found that recycling has more impact on social performance when compared with green publicity. However, green publicity has a large effect on environmental performance; moreover, green product innovation has more impact on financial performance than green publicity. We also found that environmental performance has a positive effect on financial and social performance results. The alternative models were used to examine the second-order factors of green innovation and business sustainability to test the study’s robustness and supported our findings. Thus, this study contributes to the field by helping managers to make decisions when dealing with sustainable environmental management. It provides new empirical evidence to support the development of a low-carbon circular economy and realization of a carbon-neutral goal by 2060 in China.