An investigation of indicators for measuring sustainable manufacturing

Abstract

This paper presents an investigation of sustainable manufacturing indicators in both industry and academia. While the concept of Sustainable Manufacturing has been brought up for a long time, little consensus has been researched so far with respect to how to define or measure it, especially in Economic and Social dimensions. This research tries to investigate current application status of sustainable indicators within U.S. manufacturing companies, and explore various views from academia in regards to weighting Economic / Social indicators through Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The paper concludes with a summary of statistical results as well as recommendations for its further development and practical application.

Integrated Management Solution for a Sustainable SME—Selection Proposal Using AHP

“…There are several risks of choosing incorrectly, misusing indicators, or misinterpreting them, and all these may possibly result in misleading decisions. In addition, not all existing indicators can simply be utilized in every sector, considering that is very difficult to regulate which indicators to implement, as some of the indicators may be efficient while others may not [62]. To some extent, in order to choose the suitable indicators for sustainability assessment, it is essential to closely select the indicators together with the industries involved.…”

“…Despite the complexity in choosing appropriate and appropriate sustainable indicators and criteria, there are guidelines regarding the characteristic of indicators from previous studies [62][63][64] that can be utilized to support their process of selection [65].…”

An Integrated DEMATEL-MMDE-ISM Approach for Analyzing Environmental Sustainability Indicators in MSMEs

“…Recycled material consumption and reused materials have been frequently used as indicators of environmental performance. Many studies have measured recycled material in terms of percentage of materials used that are recycled input materials (Azapagic et al, 2016;Fan et al, 2010;GRI, 2016). This indicator recognizes the organization's ability and its success to use recycled input materials for achieving environmental protection goals with respect to materials consumption.…”

“…Quantitatively this indicator is measured as Material use per unit of production on mass basis like kg/PU (Krajnc and Glavič 2003) or m 3 /PU Fan et al 2010;Winroth et al 2016).…”

“…Air emission as an indicator for evaluating the environmental impact has been used in different contexts such as cement manufacturing (Amrina et al, 2016), die-casting process planning (Singh et al, 2012), Indian Electrical Panel Industries (Gupta et al 2015), etc. Green Product Design (EN14): It refers to design of products that can be disassembled, reused or recycled being free of hazardous materials (Veleva and Ellenbecker 2001;Güngör 2006) and has been found to be an important indicator for assessing environmental performance for manufacturing activities (Fan et al 2010). A product developed with high ability of recycling, reuse, remanufacturing and reprocessing attributes contributes to the efficient utilization of resources.…”