Green manufacturing: A discussion of environmnetal performance evaluation

Energy cost and environmental issues are an ever increasing concern for business organizations, governmental agencies, and the public. A country may consume a great deal of energy and create more emissions than other countries, but their consumption may be proportional to their productivity when compared to others. Therefore, standardized environmental performance evaluations and their characteristics are needed and are the topic of this paper. A standardized environmental performance evaluation method makes the comparisons between countries, companies, or industries more meaningfully. These methods include efficiency indicators, total welfare indicators, resource depletion index, and ecosystem risk index. The methods are discussed based on the linkage between productivity and emissions/energy consumption, and the effects of evaluations on green manufacturing. Two evaluation methods, efficiency indicators and total welfare indicators are recommended because of their capability and reliability for evaluating environmental performance fairly and comprehensively. In addition, an application of efficiency indicators is demonstrated and recommended to conduct more accurate comparisons across green manufacturers.