Digital Technologies for Sustainable Waste Management On-Board Ships: An Analysis of Best Practices From the Cruise Industry

This article aims to investigate the role of digital technologies for sustainable waste management in the cruise industry to meet the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda. These issues are analyzed through the sustainability disclosure of the major cruise corporations. Under the lens of the corporate social responsibility framework and legitimacy theory, this study construed sustainability reports of four major cruise corporations published from 2015 to 2019 and their website pages by using the Leximancer text-mining software to map the underlying main research topics with the visual concepts range and manual content analysis. The results highlight the increasing commitment of cruise corporations to reduce the environmental impact by meeting sustainable development goals (SDGs) included in the UN 2030 Agenda by investing in digital technologies on-board ships. Using a double level of sustainability reporting analysis, this study, compared to previous studies, seeks to determine best practices on operational processes on-board ships regarding waste issues, including the digital technologies as an enabler to sustainability, especially SDGs. This study opens the way to scholars about waste processes and financial investment in technology issues, as well as the role played by the regulatory framework. In addition, this study highlights the insufficiency of the theory of legitimacy alone to identify best practices related to broader waste issues. Likewise, the practitioners find in this study a key roadmap about the need to involve crew and cruisers in the waste digital process thanks sharing of programs to define the waste practices. Practitioners also find the address to the factors that will make them aware of the current weakness of nonfinancial disclosure in sustainability reporting. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study represents the first time an empirical analysis conducted through sustainability reporting and other non-financial documents allows to identify "best practices" adopted on-board cruise ships to meet sustainability goals in digital waste management. Moreover, the use of two levels of analysis, by Leximancer and manual content analysis about the text documents companies make available to stakeholders, allows for identifying the high-level concepts and key ideas without bias, well as being able to define the perimeter of good practices linked to the orientation of cruise corporations toward new technologies.