Title: A measurement infrastructure for sustainable manufacturing

Authors: Shaw C. Feng, Che B. Joung

Addresses: Engineering Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 100 Bureau Drive, NIST, Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263, USA. ' Engineering Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 100 Bureau Drive, NIST, Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263, USA

Abstract: Global resource degradation, climate change, and environmental pollution are worsening due to increasing globalised industrialisation. Manufacturing industries have thus been put under pressure to cope with these problems while maintaining competitiveness. Sustainable manufacturing has been proposed to meet these challenges. The measurement of sustainability in manufacturing enables the quantitative measure of sustainability performance in specific manufacturing processes that will support decision-making for more sustainable processes and products. This paper describes a proposed sustainable manufacturing measurement infrastructure. The centre piece of this infrastructure is a sustainability performance management component that will effectively manage a sustainable indicator repository, measurement process guidelines, and sustainability performance analysis, evaluation, and reporting. The sustainability measurement infrastructure provides a foundation for decision-making tools development and enables users to create a tight integration into business strategy development processes. Examples in this paper are on carbon emissions and energy consumption.

Keywords: sustainable manufacturing; sustainability performance analysis; sustainability measurement; decision making; performance management; carbon emissions; energy consumption; CO2; carbon dioxide.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSM.2011.042152

International Journal of Sustainable Manufacturing, 2011 Vol.2 No.2/3, pp.204 - 221

Published online: 11 Mar 2015 *

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