Indicators of Sustainable Production

Abstract

The main cause of environmental damage is unsustainable production and con­sumption, especially in industrialized countries. Achieving sustainable develop­ment will require changes in industrial processes, in the type and quantity of re­sources used, in the treatment of waste, in the control of emissions, and in the products produced. One of the difficulties in measuring the company’s level of sustainability is to determine which directions of change are leading towards sus­tainability. Hence, it is necessary to apply appropriate metrics that will enable these assessments. This paper presents indicators for assessing and promoting business sustainability — indicators of sustainable production. It first introduces the main concepts of such production and a set of necessary conditions that firms must fulfill in order to be sustainable. It identifies major functions of indicators and it proceeds to presenting the role of indicators.

The paper focuses on sustainable production, proposing indicators of sustain­able production, which could be used as strategic metrics for assessing the sus­tainability level of a company and for identifying more sustainable options for the future. They enable a large amount of information to be compressed into a format easier to manipulate, compare and understand. The proposed indicators focus on the environmental, economic and social aspects of sustainable production. Most of the indicators included can be applied across industry. However, they are not aimed at being uniformly applicable to all sectors. According to the flows in the manufacture they are divided into input and output indicators and they are based on commonly measured environmental aspects of sustainable production (energy use, materials use, water consumption, products, wastes, and air emissions) cover­ing key global issues. The paper represents a new approach to the systematization of indicators and their symbols and units.