Exploring The Relationship Between Ict Development And Environmental Performance

Industry 4.0, industrial digitalization, robotics, sustainability, circular economy, eco-efficiency – these are all hot topics for researchers and professionals, as well. Since we are in the era of fourth industrial revolution, companies invest more and more money in tools and solutions that make it possible to connect all their processes, machines, workers and even products into a single network, and to gather data about them and through analyses, achieve high performance and improvement. Keeping up with technological innovation especially in ICT is vital for companies all around the world. Another important issue is sustainability and the concept of circular economy. The greatest challenge of our society is to change our operations in order to live within the limits of our planet. This expectation for change usually emerges from stakeholders of companies, but in order to gain competitive advantage it is important to improve environmental performance and their capability to create and prosper within the circular economy concept.In this paper we would like to explore if there is a connection between ICT development and environmental performance. Could these concepts work together, do companies develop both aspects and use the advances? We investigate how the application of advanced ICT tools effect companies’ environmental performan ce, which will be tested on a database of 300 companies by statistical analyses. The database was collected by the Hungarian Competitiveness Research Centre in 2013.Preliminary results say that the companies in the sample, which are advanced in use of ICT tools both in meaning of extension of usage and variety of tools, lay significantly higher emphasis on auditing environmental activity, introducing an accounting system which is capable to assess environmental expenses, and formulating environmental criteria for suppliers than those who are less advanced in ICT.