Lanndon A. Ocampo
Environmental regulations, the desire for market leadership and social stewardship along with pressing environmental crises have shifted manufacturing industries from focusing on traditional, purely profit-based strategies into pursuing the sustainability of manufactured products and manufacturing processes. However, assessing the sustainability levels of manufacturing industries poses a challenge due to the lack of holistic methods when in performing such assessments. In this area, current literature has embarked on computing an aggregate index for assessing sustainability performance. Nevertheless, approaches in computing sustainable manufacturing index are scarce in the literature. This paper presents a preliminary framework for computing a sustainable manufacturing index using the analytic hierarchy process. In this context, sustainability is interpreted from a triple-bottom line approach and the set of elements that comprise the index obtained from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology sustainable manufacturing repository. The use of this repository highlights a holistic approach in aggregate index computation as it offers a comprehensive list of elements of the triple-bottom line within the context of the manufacturing industry. Preliminary results have provided valuable insights into measuring sustainable manufacturing levels and could serve as a basic framework for index computation. The contribution of this work is on presenting a simple yet holistic approach towards computing a sustainable manufacturing index. © 2015 PEI, University of Maribor. All rights reserved.
University of San Carlos, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Cebu City, Cebu, Philippines
