Environmental sustainability index for palm oil mill industry

Abstract

Sustainable industry enhances the quality of the environment for all industries regardless of sector, size or even location. A comprehensive and systematic Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) to evaluate an environmental performance and highlight the potential improvement for palm oil mill (POM) has been proposed in this study. Similar to any other indicators, ESI depends heavily on the data availability. Therefore, in this study appropriate indicators and criteria were chosen based on palm oil mill operational data while the policy target has been selected according to the Environmental Act and POM best practices. ESI scores were obtained by adopting the Proximity-to-Target (PTT) approach that measures the current POM environmental performance relative to a policy target. The POM comparable performance is observed in policy categories and indicators through visualisation. ESI scores have been translated into five rating systems to describe the environmental performance levels of excellence, good, fair, poor and very poor for different POM. Based on the ESI scores and rating system, it was found that several environmental performance indicators for POM show low performance. In order to address these low performing indicators, improvement strategies have been recommended and ESI scores recalculated to measure the environmental sustainability improvement. ESI for POM has been successfully developed in this study to establish environmental performance profiling for POM as well as rank the POM based on a wide range of environmental indicators covering issues on water, air, energy and waste. ESI for POM serves as powerful tools that provide further benchmarking of POM environmental performance.