Status of sustainable manufacturing practices: literature review and trends of triple bottom-line-based sustainability assessment methodologies

Abstract

Due to significant requirement of energy, water, material, and other resources, the manufacturing industries significantly impact environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainability (triple bottom-line). In response, today’s research is focused on finding solution towards sustainable manufacturing. In this regard, sustainability assessment is an essential strategy. In the past, a variety of tools was developed to evaluate the environmental dimension. Because of this fact, previous review studies were grounded mostly on tools for green manufacturing. Unlike previous review articles, this study was aimed to review and analyze the emerging sustainability assessment methodologies (published from 2010 to 2020) for manufacturing while considering the triple bottom-line concept of sustainability. In this way, the paper presents a decade review on this topic, starting from 2010 as the guidelines for the social dimension became available in 2009. This paper has analyzed various methods and explored recent progress patterns. First, this study critically reviewed the methods and then analyzed their different integrating tools, sustainability dimensions, nature of indicators, difficulty levels, assessment boundaries, etc. The review showed that life cycle assessment and analytic hierarchy process–based approaches were most commonly used as integrating tools. Comparatively, still, environmental dimension was more commonly considered than economic and social dimensions by most of the reviewed methods. From indicators’ viewpoint, most of the studied tools were based on limited number of indicators, having no relative weights and validation from the experts. To overcome these challenges, future research directions were outlined to make these methods more inclusive and reliable. Along with putting more focus on economic and social dimensions, there is a need to employ weighted, validated, and applicable indicators in sustainability assessment methods for manufacturing.