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Industrial growth has positively influenced the economic development but has also generated adverse effects on the environment. To minimize the environmental burdens resulting from industrial activity, new practices and management tools have been developed, including the concept of ecoefficiency which has aided the response to manufacturing environmental issues. However, traditional ecoefficiency measurement involves the use of multiple indicators that are individually evaluated over time to verify if the ecoefficiency is improving or worsening. This practice is procedurally difficult because ecoefficiency indicators can vary in opposite directions. To assess this issue, this paper suggests a procedure to appraise the ecoefficiency level of a manufacturing process by means of a conceptual proposal of a single measure that could reflect the process’ global progress, even if the selected ecoefficiency indexes move in opposite ways.

The proposed concepts were developed through a theoretical approach to gauge the ecoefficiency level of a single piece of equipment, which was then expanded to the whole production process area. This work can be categorized as a conceptual paper using literature review and theoretical developments as basic tools to support the concepts proposed. Complementarily, one practical example is presented to illustrate the application of the suggested procedure to a real‐life situation.

Initially the paper proposed a manner to evaluate the ecoefficiency level of a single machine combining the selected ecoefficiency indicators into a single index. Next, this concept was extended to consider the whole production process area by merging the ecoefficiency level of each equipment existing in a given production area with another single quantity named ecoefficiency level of the manufacturing process under consideration. The concepts developed were applied to a case study to show its use in a real‐life scenario.

Although the suggested technique could in principle be used in most common manufacturing situations, its widespread utilization cannot be assured based on the developments made in this paper. This could be a possible limitation to the concepts suggested. However, additional empirical research considering other types of production conditions could resolve this problem.

For the practitioners and managers dealing with environmental matters in manufacturing, this paper makes a relevant contribution because it permits the utilization of a single measure to appraise the ecoefficiency level in a single piece of equipment or in the entire production process, allowing challenging areas and the associated actions required to improve them to be identified.

Although the integration of environmental pressures into a single environmental performance measure has been a major challenge, this paper conceptualizes the ecoefficiency level of a production process by suggesting of a single measure that could reflect its global evolution, even if the selected ecoefficiency indicators move in opposite directions.

Recent studies suggest extensive use of environmental resources in agrofarming degrades ecosystem significantly. In this backdrop, this study aims at assessing ecoefficiency of paddy farming. Because ecoefficiency links up between economic performances and environmental resources supporting the provision of goods and services for the society, this study further investigates the effectiveness of attending Farmers' Field School (FFS), an agroenvironmental program, in conserving environmental resources through improving farm-level ecoefficiency.

In a dataset of 200 randomly selected paddy farmers from three districts of the southwestern Bangladesh, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is applied to compute both radial and pressure-specific (nutrient balance, energy balance, irrigation and pesticide lethal risk) ecoefficiency scores. Furthermore, propensity score matching (PSM) technique is applied to examine the impact of FFS program on farm-level ecoefficiency.

The DEA results suggest that paddy farmers are highly eco-inefficient. The computed radial eco-efficiency score is 0.40 implying farmers could reduce around 60% of environmental pressure equiproportionally even by maintaining the same level of value addition. In addition, the PSM results suggest farmers' participation in FFS program led to around 22.5% higher radial ecoefficiency and 7–25% higher environmental pressure-specific eco-efficiencies. Furthermore, simulation exercises reveal that FFS participation in interaction with farm size would lead to around 32–40% reduction of all environmental pressures.

Promoting FFS programs among paddy farmers could be an effective policy option to improve eco-efficiency through environment-friendly farming paradigm.

This study is probably the maiden effort that has examined the impact of attending the FFS program on ecoefficiency improvement in Bangladesh. This study contributes to both the concern literature by adding useful information and the policymakers by providing new insights about the reduction of environmental resource usage with maintaining the same value addition from agrofarming.

This paper aims to examine the antecedent factor, top management's commitment to environmental sustainability, for the adoption of a sophisticated internal environmental information system; measured by the broad‐scope, timeliness, aggregation and integration of such information. The paper also seeks to examine whether the availability of such a system would lead to improved environmental performance.

The paper investigates responses from a survey of Chief Financial Officers or chief management accountants in the top 200 listed companies in Australia. It uses linear regression analysis based on a multiple‐mediator model with percentile‐based bootstrap, bias‐corrected (BC) and bias‐corrected and accelerated (BCa) bootstrap confidence intervals to identify significant mediators.

It was found in this study that top management commitment to environmental sustainability was associated with the adoption of a sophisticated internal environmental information system. Further, the availability of aggregated environmental information was found to mediate the relationship between top management commitment to environmental sustainability and environmental performance. However, there was no significant relationship to other mediating variables.

Limitations relate to the collinearity of mediators which make it difficult to identify the impact of specific mediators in a multi‐mediator model. The implications are that other methods may provide further value, but these may need to be based on either different data or larger samples.

The findings point to the importance of aggregated environmental accounting information to organisations aiming to improve their environmental performance.

The study contributes to the corporate environmental accounting literature by empirically linking the top management commitment to environmental sustainability and to environmental performance through the adoption of accounting information provisions. The results of this study also provide guidance to practitioners about how to ensure their commitment to environmental sustainability will be translated to environmental performance and to some extent provide some answer to whether countries such as Australia should implement Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) to account for carbon costs.

In the United States, many arguments for mass transport often focus on its benefits to the environment or in terms of congestion relief. This chapter instead looks at direct micro-scale and meso-scale economic and social benefits by identifying occupations, industries, and demographic groups that are both growing and can benefit from transit. In using this form of local-scale identification of unique economic circumstances, government planners, elected officials, and academics can create a practical, GIS-focused approach to increase the utility and acceptance of mass transportation in the United States.

Using a GIS-based approach with US Census and US Labor Department data, the chapter focuses on local growth sectors in the economy, then identifying their transit-usage patterns. Additionally some GIS are used to identify concentration areas of both occupations and transit usage, along with areas of likely employment for those individuals. Locally this creates “micro-climates” or hot spots for favorable views and usage of transport. These micro-climates can be duplicated in other similar areas to increase utilization, and therefore return on investment, of public transportation.

For denser areas, affluent downtowns, and areas which are accessible to hospitals and universities, the primary growth engines of the current US labor market, transit has a positive correlated relationship. Additionally, recent immigrant groups, particularly those with limited English speaking ability, have also shown a correlated growth in transit usage. By identifying these areas with GIS, transit can better align its services to needs and improve it return on investment.

The United States has had a fifty-year-long negative view of public transport outside of major urban areas. By identifying groups with positive correlated use of transit, the return on investment and public perception of its use and environmental sustainability can mesh with land use planning and perceived quality of the service. In so doing, transit use may be encouraged.

The United States is faced with very high petrol prices relative to its history, and somewhat lesser incomes among its sub-age-30 work cohorts. This has encouraged density. However, in order to provide for this increased demand, there must be an increase in both supply and politically perceived value in its investment. This chapter seeks to be an early pragmatic model in valuing public transport at a local level.

The traditional approach of operations management has evaluated an organisation’s performance based on four main areas: cost, quality, time and service. However, the necessity to introduce environmental protection measures in firms so as to achieve sustainable development has forced a redefinition of the operations function. This paper reviews the literature on operations management and environmental issues, in order to determine the role of operations in sustainability. We justify the need to include environmental performance as a new dimension of operations performance. Finally, we analyse environmental performance as an operations objective and present certain aspects that should be taken into account when measuring it.

Each production unit is responsible for the protection of the environment. The restricted undesirable production effects lower environmental damage. This paper emphasizes a proportional reduction of the undesirable outputs, and it supports the growth of desirable outputs as much as possible as well. The two-stage proposed model not only considers the viewpoint of the managers to follow the environmental regulations but also it assigns some bounds on producing undesirable factors according to international environmental protocols. Additionally, the restricted bounds on the undesirable outputs, in both stages, enhance the discriminatory ability of the model.

Two-stage network structure based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is applied as the main methodology for this paper. The advantages of the proposed model are appointed to assess the environmental units.

Comparing with the existing models, the proposed approach presents a new two-stage model to deal with the environmental issues. Furthermore, the discriminatory ability of the efficiency scores is improved. The distribution of this model is greater than the existing ones.

This paper is fully written, submitted and revised during limitations caused by coronavirus .

The proposed method is employed in two different cases. The efficiency scores of 25 power plants and 13 poultry farms are determined. In fact, the undesirable outputs never meet zero in the process of production but they can be reduced. The results of this research support the effect of the undesirable factors' restriction on the reduction scenario. Both of the examples show that imposing the upper bounds for the undesirable products provide low-efficiency results in comparison with the existing model. On the other hand, the results cover the arguments of sustainability in the evaluation of environmental efficiency.

In the production process, desirable outputs and undesirable factors are produced jointly so undesirable factors never meet zero. This paper develops a new two-stage method to reduce the undesirable outputs at each stage. First, the model confirms the reduction of undesirable outputs. Second, this model imposes restrictions on intermediate and final undesirable outputs according to environmental rights and the concerns of the managers. The model increases the discrimination of the efficiency assessment of real-life two-stage environmental systems as well. Then it focuses on the production of desirable outputs. The new objective function is defined according to the aim of the proposed model that not only declares better efficiency decomposition to the individual system but also the efficiency score is evaluated for each stage.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a set of lifecycle-based indicators to describe material eco-efficiency of buildings normalized per unit of gross floor area (GFA), and at verifying feasibility of their calculation for building materials and components, based upon four case studies. The paper also examines the effects that discrepancies between two carbon footprint accounting methods (embodied CO₂ (ECO₂) vs embodied CO_2e) have on communication of environmental performance of selected materials.

The lifecycle assessments (LCAs) were performed through LCA support platform SimaPro 7.3. Data for materials/components production cycle modeling were collected from primary and secondary data from national literature or adapted from Ecoinvent database. Embodied energy, ECO₂, blue water footprint (bWF), non-renewable content and volatile organic compound emissions (VOCe) indicators were calculated from lifecycle inventory (LCI) outputs, while embodied CO_2e was calculated using CML 2001 v.2.01 impact assessment method.

Obtained results suggest that a core database comprised of 12 materials and components – cement, ceramic blocks, steel rebar, sawn timber planks, PVC tubes, plywood, PVC conduits, roof steel structure, roundwood, ceramic tiles, hydrated lime and adhesive mortar – provides a very reasonable description of a building's embodied energy (99.63 percent), embodied CO_2e (97.50 percent), bWF (96.26 percent), non-renewable content (97.53 percent) and VOCe (95.38 percent) profiles. Except for bWF of cement and concrete, substantial reductions in the metrics’ values captured environmental advantages of partially substituting ground granulated blast furnace slag (ggbs) for clinker Portland.

The disclosure of embodied energy and carbon, as well as of other environmental performance data at whole-building level (per unit of GFA) pointed out in this paper, allows comparability and helps to establish performance goals and benchmarks and to guide policy decisions. Following a coordinated methodological outline, future works are expected to evolve to gradually constitute a LCI database that enables the use of the proposed metrics and of LCA as decision-making tools in the building sector.