Assessing redundancies in environmental performance measures for supply chains

Abstract

Incorporating environmental sustainability into production systems and supply chain management perspectives is a growing issue; this requires thorough efforts in measuring the environmental performance of such systems and benchmarking these against industry standards, through the usage of appropriate indicators.The usage of environmental indicators in order to monitor and manage sustainability issues is an ongoing topic of debate and deliberation in the scientific community, which has generated the development of several methodological and conceptual approaches, often incorporated into Life Cycle Assessment frameworks, enabling the evaluation and monitoring of cumulative polluting impacts resulting across the whole product supply chain. In this field, the main challenge is to identify indicators to be employed in environmental assessments, in such a way that a precise account of sustainability issues is given without overloading end-users with overly complex and redundant information.By utilising well-established environmental indicators measuring the sustainability performance of supply chains, this paper aims at critically assessing the amount of redundancy embedded in current performance measurement systems, also identifying the subset of environmental indicators that, if employed, could cover a wide amount of environmental impact categories without redundancies and providing decision-makers with a clear perspective.