Environmental, Social and Economic Sustainability in Mining Companies as a Result of the Interaction between Knowledge Management and Green Innovation—The SEM Approach

The mining industry is one of the greatest polluters of the environment and has direct positive and negative impacts on all three pillars of sustainable development: economy, environment and society. Due to the aforementioned, primarily negative impacts on the environment, it is important to implement sustainability principles in the operations of companies in the mining industry. The implementation of the sustainability principle enables the economically profitable, ecologically clean and socially responsible exploitation and processing of mineral raw materials. This means of doing business requires the introduction of clean or green technologies, which are the product of green innovation. The innovation process is highly dependent on knowledge. Knowledge has a great contribution to creativity and the creation of innovation. Accordingly, knowledge management activities and the ability of a company to use and combine different sources of knowledge are essential for the creation of different types of innovation, including green innovation. The research, including the pilot test, was carried out in the period of May–August 2022, whereby convenience sampling was used to obtain 626 employees in six mining companies in Serbia. The structural equation modeling approach was used to evaluate the causal relationship between knowledge management, green innovation and the sustainable operations of the mining industry. The indirect effects of the dimensions of knowledge management, through the dimensions of green innovation, on the dimensions of sustainable development were examined using the bootstrap procedure. The results of the study confirmed the positive direct and indirect relations between the constructs. The research indicates the importance of including all components of knowledge management and green innovation in achieving all components of business sustainability.