Governance and Socially Responsible Energy Consumption

Abstract

In the ever increasing worldwide attention to the concept of sustainable development, industrial engineering as productivity champion has not received major attention. This is unfortunate as one can see it as the toolkit to attain sustainable development because industrial engineering is concerned with productivity as the measure for production and service efficiency. Without this it would be difficult to quantify the quality aspects of sustainable development and evaluate the integrated systems of man, money, materials, energy, knowledge, information and equipment, all instances of the three pillars.Energy efficiency is one route towards minimising environmental impact, achieving sustainability and therefore making possible sustainable development. This chapter analyses industrial engineering tools to assess how sustainable our current energy consumption is. For this analysis refrigerators are taken as the sample. This is due to general usage of refrigerators by all people everywhere and due to its major role in worldwide energy consumption. Energy labels are nowadays a common feature of refrigerators put into the market for sale, although this trend is diverse in different parts of the world which signals non-harmonized comprehension of sustainable development in the world.These are explored at a theoretical level to show that industrial engineering tools contribute to sustainability.The implications of using game theory to address these issues are substantial although not previously used.

Citation

Seifi, S. (2013), "Governance and Socially Responsible Energy Consumption", Crowther, D. and Aras, G. (Ed.) The Governance of Risk (Developments in Corporate Governance and Responsibility, Vol. 5), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 95-110. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2043-0523(2013)0000005008