Prioritizing Barriers to Green Manufacturing: Environmental, Social and Economic Perspectives

Manufacturing firms consume energy and natural resources in highly unsustainable manner and release large amounts of green house gases leading to many economic, environmental and social problems from climate change to local waste disposal. A growing number of organizations have begun working towards implementation of Green Manufacturing (GM) because of increased concerns about the pollution increase, natural resources depletion and global warming. However, there are barriers which hinder the implementation of GM. In order to mitigate these barriers, the prioritization of barriers is essential as high-priority barriers can be taken up first to address the issue more effectively within the available resources. The prioritization becomes more vital for the emerging countries because of the limited recourses. This paper aims at identifying and prioritizing barriers to GM implementation. A fuzzy TOPSIS multi-criteria decision model has been developed to prioritize these barriers from environmental, social and economic perspectives. The study concluded that lack of awareness/information, technological risk and weak legislation are three most important barriers to GM. The prioritization of the barriers from different perspectives is expected to help the decision/policy makers in government and industry to mitigate these barriers in an effective manner.