Development of checklist for evaluating sustainability characteristics of manufacturing processes

In recent times manufacturing organisations have been witnessing stringent regulations from government towards environmental policies. In order to cope with the government rules and regulations, many organisations identified sustainable manufacturing as the principal solution. There exists a need to check the effectiveness of sustainability principles implementation. The effectiveness can be measured either using quantitative or qualitative approaches. In general sustainable manufacturing has been viewed in three perspectives namely: process, product and material. Among three orientations, process orientation gains attention as it forms the major contributor for the performance of sustainable concepts in the organisation. In order to assess the process orientation of manufacturing organisations, in this study we attempt to develop a checklist to measure the process orientation specifically. The checklist was developed based on triple bottom line (TBL) concept proposed by Elkington (1997). The checklist consists of 40 questions which covers all three Es of TBL namely: ecology, equity and economy. In order to check the practical usability of the developed checklist, the process sustainability characteristics were measured in five organisations across various sectors.