Usage dynamics of environmental sustainability indicators for manufacturing and service systems
Abstract
The lack of understanding environmental sustainability indicators from user aspects often leads to the development of useless and impractical indicators, which prevent current and future implementation of environmental sustainability indicators in companies. Existing studies have not clearly addressed relationships among current usage status, perceived utility, and future implementation of environmental sustainability indicators for companies. Accordingly, it is hard to reflect the underlying usage dynamics of environmental sustainability indicators during their development stage. This study aims to identify the usage dynamics of environmental sustainability indicators for manufacturing and service sectors in terms of utility (i.e., usefulness and practicality) and utilization (i.e., used in practice and future implementation). This study is based on survey data for the utility and utilization of 55 environmental sustainability indicators from global companies with manufacturing and service systems. Bayesian networks for the surveyed data are built to understand the causal relationships between the utility and utilization of environmental sustainability indicators depending on company characteristics (i.e., industry sector, company size, and target market location) and indicator categories (i.e., energy, water, resources, pollution, environment, and technique/process). Furthermore, the scenario-based probabilistic inferences of the Bayesian networks are analyzed to estimate changes in the present and future utilization of environmental sustainability indicators when the usefulness and practicality levels are improved. The results show that the indicator usage of the industry sectors may be characterized in two aspects: utility-based usage and experience-based usage. In the small and medium sized companies, current indicator usage affected by indicator practicality determines the future implementation of the indicators. Most major market locations have the same causal relationships of indicator usage dynamics as the large sized companies. Indicator practicality serves a main cause for the causal relationships in the usage dynamics of most indicator categories. Furthermore, the usage dynamics models show which perceived user aspects of environmental sustainability indicators should be emphasized more to result in proactive current and future indicator implementation for specific usage cases. The findings of this study provide general guidelines for the development of user-friendly environmental sustainability indicators.
- Publication:
-
Journal of Cleaner Production
- Pub Date:
- August 2022
- DOI:
- 10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.132062
- Bibcode:
- 2022JCPro.36032062K
- Keywords:
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- Environmental sustainability indicators;
- Indicator utilization;
- Indicator utility;
- Usage dynamics;
- Causal relationships;
- Bayesian networks