Abstract
The aim of this paper is to develop a conceptual sustainable manufacturing (SM) framework, which is the pressing need of highly competitive and natural resource scarce world. Systematic literature review has been adopted to identify enablers of SM. The enablers identified through systematic literature review includes product design, material selection & procurement, customer requirements, regulatory norms, social values & ethics, environmental priorities, energy costs, natural resource scarcity, supply chain & logistics systems, fuel price regulations, public awareness, technology and total quality management. Author has attempted to develop a contextual relationship among enablers of SM using interpretive structural modeling. The author has further classified enablers into four categories using MICMAC analysis. The author has also outlined the limitations of present study and identified further research directions.
Top1. Introduction
Sustainable manufacturing is the need of the current era as global warming, manmade pollution and natural resource scarcity are becoming like a sword of Damocles to the world. Insights from the literature on the topic show that, sustainability in manufacturing must be taken into consideration from the product design stage through production to the logistics stage. Sustainability has got three aspects in manufacturing. These aspects includes: 1) the manufacturing sustainability in the production process; 2) sustainability during the use of the product, 3) sustainability for the recycling and logistics point of view. We can say that product design, material selection, manufacturing process design and resource utilization as the factors of first aspect; environmental emission from the product, ease of maintenance etc. as the factors of second aspect and ease of disassembly, recyclability, reusability of materials as the factors of third aspect. According to Garbie (2014); Carter and Easton (2011); Dyllick and Hockerts (2002), Environment, society and economy are the three widely accepted components of sustainability. Manufacturing can be defined as the process of converting raw materials into value added useful tangible finished products for a specific use through one or more operations. Hence, sustainable manufacturing can be defined as the innovative technology and organizational practices which ensures zero negative impact to the environment, community, employees with the minimum use of raw materials and energy and which produces high quality recyclable finished products. Different viewpoints and definitions on sustainability and sustainable development from different literature are listed in Table 1. Through systematic literature review, the authors have identified twelve key driving factors of sustainable manufacturing. Since these factors are much broad in their sense, sub-dimensions of these variables are also elaborated from literature.