Internationalisation, waste management, and board attributes

Abstract

We investigate whether internationalisation is significantly associated with waste management. Secondly, by focusing on two critical board attributes, we investigate whether female and tenured directors help enable internationalised firms' better waste management. We find that more internationalised firms produce more waste; this result is robust to various waste proxies such as total waste, hazardous and nonhazardous waste and waste scaled by turnover. Although they tend to engage with less recycling, the result is insignificant. Furthermore, we find that both female and tenured directors significantly moderate between internationalisation and waste management; they help reduce waste in internationalised firms. However, they cannot significantly moderate between internationalisation and waste recycling, which seems a missing link in better waste management of internationalised firms. The results imply that multinationals pollute the environment by producing more waste and not engaging in waste recycling. Given the cross-border scale of their manufacturing, sales and/or logistics operations, the findings are of critical importance for multinationals, their governance structure and stakeholders. We posit that international firms are more exposed to visibility and hence are under the scrutiny of stakeholders such as regulatory bodies, the press and environmentalists. Waste production and lack of waste recycling might trigger legitimacy concerns and incompatibility sanctions.