Material efficiency in the German manufacturing industry: Which strategic stimuli facilitate the tapping of the saving potentials?

Recycling concepts are a means to harness material saving potentials and to exploit existing economic potentials. Our paper aims at analysing how and to what extend the firm-level determinants "usage of total cost of ownership concepts", "usage of environmental performance indicators", "external information sources" and "cooperating for process innovations" influence the usage of recycling concepts. We use a large empirical sample of the German manufacturing sector and analyse it by using bivariate and multivariate tests. The results might support decision makers in companies and policy makers in identifying the right spots to tackle existing challenges concerning material efficiency in production.