Recognizing that natural environment is reaching its maximum limits in providing resources and diluting the waste generated by human production systems, efforts toward more sustainable production systems are mandatory to secure the development of future generations. For this purpose, changing the productivity model adopted by companies that are almost exclusively rooted on circulating money to generate profit, named business as usual, is an important issue. In this sense, an alternative would be establishing the relationship of stocks and flows of energy, material, and information with environmental, economic and social outcomes, thus resulting in new accounting approaches. This work aims to propose an activity-based costing (ABC) based on multicriteria drivers including economic, emissions, and emergy (with an "m") values. The proposed ABC costing allocates each one of the multicriteria drivers into a specific part of the sustainability conceptual model, in an attempt to embrace a holistic perspective and allow for a sustainable-based decision, rather than considering purely economic drivers. The goal programming (GP) method is considered so as to support a decision based on multicriteria aspects. Results show that the proposed accounting approach known as ABC sustain allows for decisions toward a company's sustainability by acting on both the amount and kind of a company's product that should be managed, as well as on the effective increase of a specific company's activity or process. The proposed ABC sustain could make the insertion of environmental issues into companies strategic planning more effective. It is expected that environmental issues go beyond a simple diagnoses and begin to be considered as action in factum in the companies' decisions toward achieving a more sustainable world system.
The world’s water resources are under pressure due to human activities. The challenges surrounding water resources management include enhancing long-term water security and minimizing undesirable economic, social, and environmental impacts, along with the production chain. Since water and wastewater treatment plants are designed to maintain and conserve freshwater provisioning services, understanding how they operate—prior to proposing options for sustainability—is of paramount importance. The diagnostic phase calls for scientifically-based, systemic, and more objective methods to provide information for decision-makers regarding strategic management of water resources. This work applied the FIVE SEctor SUstainability (5SEnSU) model to assess twenty major water and wastewater treatment companies (WWTC) in Brazil, to quantify sustainability levels that allowed ranking procedures, and to establish benchmarks for improvements. On a comparative basis, the results identified the top-three sustainable companies—CORSAN, CASAN, and SANEPAR—which should be considered as examples of best practices. Specifically, the following best-ranked companies in each sector within 5SEnSU should be used as benchmark patterns for more oriented best practices: SANEAGO, sector 1; AGESPISA, sector 2; CORSAN, sector 3; CASAL, sector 4; MA, sector 5. This work contributes toward the advancement of sustainability assessment modeling in human-managed systems (applied in WWTCs in this present study) from systemic- and epistemologically-rooted approaches, avoiding shortcomings and misleading discussions on the sustainability issue. Quantifying sustainability of WWTCs using the 5SEnSU model allows for the identification of those sectors/indicators that require immediate cleaner production practices by decision-makers, to improve overall sustainability, as well as to identify which companies are more aligned with the requirements of UN SDGs. The decision-makers would be able to visualize balanced or unbalanced relationships among all sectors and propose actions that would improve the performance in a given sector, realizing what effects a given action would cause in the other sectors of the system.
Para alcanzar un desarrollo económico sostenible consistente con los 17 objetivos de la agenda 2030 de las Naciones Unidas, Ecuador debe transformar su modelo económico primario exportador a otro de economía diversificada. El artículo tiene como objetivo evaluar las relaciones intersectoriales de la matriz productiva de la provincia Esmeraldas usando el modelo insumo producto como herramienta de gestión sectorial, lo que permitió elaborar la matriz insumo producto provincial y evaluar su potencial económico. Fueron clasificados los 44 sectores que componen su estructura económica e identificados aquellos con mayores y menores encadenamientos productivos. Además se identificaron discontinuidades en los encadenamientos y se formularon políticas públicas para contribuir al cambio de la matriz productiva.
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