Flash Eurobarometer 342 (Small and Medium Enterprises, Resource Efficiency and Green Markets, wave 1)

Small and medium enterprises, resource efficiency, and green markets.<br>Topics: company’s activities with regard to environmental legislation; reasons for not going beyond environmental legislation requirements; actions undertaken to improve resource efficiency: saving water, saving energy, using predominantly renewable energy, saving materials, minimizing waste, selling of scrap material, recycling, designing products easy to maintain, repair, or reuse; actions to be implemented in the next two years; main reasons for undertaking actions for more resource efficiency; impact of actions on production costs over the past two years; average investment per year on resource efficiency actions over the past two years; use of one of the following environmental management systems: EMAS, ISO 14001, ISO 14064, ISO 16000, national or regional environmental management system; reasons for using or not using an environmental management system; activities of the company regarding public procurement contracts that included environmental requirements; difficulties experienced with regard to environmental requirements in bidding for public procurement tenders: complying with environmental requirements, resulting costs, providing compliance administratively; most important difficulty; type of external support received; satisfaction with level of public support for company’s environmental actions; kind of received EU support; difficulties encountered when trying to set up resource efficiency actions: complexity of administrative or legal procedures, difficulty to adapt environmental legislation to own company, technical requirements of legislation not up to date, choosing right environmental actions for own company, cost of environmental actions, lack of environmental expertise; most effective policy measures to promote energy efficiency; green products or services offered by company; area and kind of green products or services offered; percentage of the company’s turnover in the last fiscal year coming from green products or services; time when company started selling green products or services; main reasons for offering or not offering green products or services; main markets for green products or services; types of external support for the production of green products or services; satisfaction with level of public support for company’s green products or services; most helpful types of support to launch or to expand range of green products or services; number of full time employees in the company working in green jobs some or all of the time; expected number of employees working in green jobs in two years’ time.

Demography: company sector; number of employees; year of company establishment; development of turnover in the last two years; total turnover in 2011; direct selling to final consumers.

Additionally coded was: respondent ID; country; NACE-Code; nation group; weighting factor.