Total Quality Environmental Management Toward Sustainability: Need and Implementation in Libyan Food Industry

Abstract

mplementing Total Quality Environmental Management (TQEM) improves environment, quality, sustainability, and reduces food risks. TQEM has emerged from integrating Environmental Management System (EMS) into the Total Quality Management (TQM). In this paper, an investigation is presented to study the current situation, and identify the barriers and motivations for implementing TQEM towards sustainability for Libyan food industry (LFI). A qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews was adopted to collect the data with general, operation, and quality managers in LFI. The findings show that LFI are still in the early stage of quality and a little concern about the EMS and TQM has been given. There are five key barriers and five motivations for implementing TQEM in LFI. The paper contributes to the existing knowledge by investigating the implementation of TQEM in different context (i.e., Arab/North African) to the one that the quality and environmental theory developed in. Also, the paper studies all barriers and motivations of TQM and EMS implementation compared with previous studies focusing on few barriers and motivations. The paper provides ideas and insights for LFI managers to develop their implementation in TQEM while also considering quality and environmental issues.

National Environmental Factors for Implementing Total Quality Environmental Management in the Libyan Food Industry

“…The findings show that the social responsibility factor is a new phenomenon that has not generally been studied Saad et al; BJEMT, 11(4): 1-18, 2016; Article no.BJEMT.23182 2 in Libya, and particularly not in the LFI. Conclusion: This research contributes to the knowledge by investigating the national environmental factors for implementation of TQEM in a different context (i.e., the Arab/North African context).…”

“…It is obvious that there is not enough information for the investigations of this study concerning the impact of individual TQEM implementation's outcomes. It is evident that there is a lack of investigations that study the impact of environmental factors for TQEM's outcomes [3,10,13,28]. The researcher therefore found that introducing this objective into the current study may contribute to the TQEM literature, in particular that concerning TQEM implementation in the Arab world.…”

“…The Libyan government has looked for opportunities for Libyan organizations to expand into emerging markets, at the same time as they are expanding their share in existing markets [20,22,23]. So, managers in Libyan companies are attempting to examine the extent of TQM and EMS factors, awareness, and the difficulties facing its implementation towards TQEM [10]. According to [20,25,26], because of the high competition in the Libyan market, the Libyan industry should pay attention to human resources, competition, and organizational culture, and this is reflected in the overall planning of quality and environment management efforts.…”

“…In TQEM literature [1-3, [8][9][10], it has been revealed that the environmental factors are critical to the implementation of TQEM. However, one overriding consideration is that the organizations can use TQEM that relies on the level of technology.…”

Investigating Environmental Management and Quality Management Issues in the Libyan Food Industry

“…In contrast, only a few studies exist concerning the advancement of ideas such as these in developing countries [10]. However, these countries have suffered from a lack of environmental governmental control, poor cost management, high storage risks, low productivity levels, and are burdened by less developed technologies, the combination of which consequently resulting in negative environmental effects [11,12,13]. This therefore demonstrates the need to give greater consideration to environmental protection and increased efforts to improvement products and services [14].…”