Environmental appraisal of green production systems: Challenges faced by small companies using life cycle assessment

Heidrich, Oliver; Tiwary, Abhishek

doi:10.1080/00207543.2013.807372

Cited by 67 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Sixty percent of articles focus on generic SMEs and are still not industry or sector specific. The next largest sectors are industrial (e.g., Madsen & Ulhøi, ), agriculture and construction (e.g., Heidrich & Tiwary, ; Piedra‐Munoz, Vega‐Lopez, Galdeano‐Gomez, & Zepeda‐Zepeda, ), and food and beverage (e.g., Hamann et al, ), with 22%, 6%, and 6% share of the studies, respectively. There are clearly not enough studies on other sectors such as textile, travel, and retail sectors.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An analysis of environmental sustainability in small & medium‐sized enterprises: Patterns and trends

et al. 2020

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One of the greatest challenges facing the world today is climate change. The need to consistently advance with environmentally sustainable practices in today's businesses is crucial, and businesses are demanded to be more environmentally sustainable every day. This study conducts an analysis of the literature on small and medium‐sized enterprises' (SMEs) environmental sustainability by carefully examining 122 studies from 58 journals published from 2013 to 2019. We investigate the trends in drivers and barriers of sustainability adoption to inform both SMEs managers and policymakers. Our results also classify the reviewed studies on the basis of their methodologies and show the distribution of studies across industry sectors and locations in order to set directions for future research on sustainability practices of SMEs.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An analysis of environmental sustainability in small & medium‐sized enterprises: Patterns and trends

et al. 2020

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“…Other, deeper, aspects of sustainability, particularly non-technical aspects, can be difficult to define or describe, making them an ambiguous concept for companies of various sizes and its workforce (Heidrich and Tiwary, 2013;Jowitt, 2004;Valdes-Vasquez and Klotz, 2011). The double challenge posed by sustainability to both paradigm (i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Teaching sustainability to first year civil engineering students

Bramald¹,

Heidrich²,

Hall³

2015

Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Engineering

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The role of, and need for, universities to create and promote a holistic approach to engineering is a key part of developing sustainability literacy among future engineers. This paper reports on three different, but linked, exercises that teach undergraduates the complexity of sustainability in civil engineering. In the first exercise, students prepared a written commentary on an exploration of their campus locale to identify typical civil engineering issues such as construction trends over time and set these against economic and social demands and impacts at a city scale. The second exercise asked students to rank the importance of components of sustainable communities as a civil engineer, and then rank them separately as a citizen. In the third exercise, ten groups of approximately ten students were led through a discussion around a holistic approach to engineering and the impact of civil engineering infrastructure development. These exercises provide students with an understanding of hard-to-measure boundary conditions, more informally 'context', which can surround the technical excellence at the heart of civil engineering systems. The paper reports student feedback and discusses implications for teaching sustainability. The exercises and experiences presented in this paper can be utilised by other civil engineering degree providers.

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“…These limitations relate in particular to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). As demonstrated by the recent studies (Heidrich and Tiwary, 2013;Witczak et al, 2014), SMEs often are not able to compile large inventories and/or conduct a comprehensive impact assessment, mainly because of lack of expertise, time and cost issues.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hybrid approach for the evaluation of organizational indirect impacts (AVOID): combining product-related, process-based, and monetary-based methods

Finogenova

Bach

Berger

et al. 2018

Int J Life Cycle Assess

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Purpose: Environmental burden caused by an organization occur both within its boundaries and in its value chain. Organizational Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was proposed as a method for calculating impacts of an organization throughout its life cycle, nevertheless companies are still lacking a universal approach to conduct inventory analysis and face challenges in data collection. This paper introduces a hybrid approach for compiling the inventory for the indirect activities on organizational level in an effective manner. Methods: Three existing accounting methods (namely product related, process based and monetary based) are connected within the hybrid approach. The potential to apply each method for an indirect activity is analysed with regard to the system boundary requirements and availability of activity data and emission factors. The calculation procedures are introduced for selected activities. The advantages and limitations of the hybridization on organizational level are discussed. The developed approach is applied in a case study to the automotive supplier Brose Fahrzeugteile GmbH & Co.KG. Results and discussion: The framework for application of the hybrid approach including the required activity data and emission factors for every indirect activity and each accounting method is provided. The product related and process based methods are recommended as more robust, nevertheless hybridization with the monetary based method might be essential for compiling a comprehensive inventory by limited data availability. Such limitations as double counting, truncation error and insufficient data resolution may influence the results and should be considered when applying the hybrid approach. The case study demonstrated that the proposed approach allowed establishing an inventory for all relevant indirect activities. However, due to missing emission factors only the impact category climate change was calculated for all activities, acidification and water use were quantified for six activities. Conclusions: The introduced hybrid approach enables selecting the most suitable accounting method for the indirect activities depending on data availability. This promotes application of the Organizational Life Cycle Assessment in particular for small and medium enterprises and companies that do not have access to the commercial LCA datasets. Availability of the emission factors for all impact categories in public databases is essential to provide robust results using the hybrid approach. .

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Environmental appraisal of green production systems: Challenges faced by small companies using life cycle assessment

Cited by 67 publications

References 48 publications

An analysis of environmental sustainability in small & medium‐sized enterprises: Patterns and trends

An analysis of environmental sustainability in small & medium‐sized enterprises: Patterns and trends

Teaching sustainability to first year civil engineering students

Hybrid approach for the evaluation of organizational indirect impacts (AVOID): combining product-related, process-based, and monetary-based methods

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