Total Quality Environmental Management Toward Sustainability: Need and Implementation in Libyan Food Industry

Abstract

mplementing Total Quality Environmental Management (TQEM) improves environment, quality, sustainability, and reduces food risks. TQEM has emerged from integrating Environmental Management System (EMS) into the Total Quality Management (TQM). In this paper, an investigation is presented to study the current situation, and identify the barriers and motivations for implementing TQEM towards sustainability for Libyan food industry (LFI). A qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews was adopted to collect the data with general, operation, and quality managers in LFI. The findings show that LFI are still in the early stage of quality and a little concern about the EMS and TQM has been given. There are five key barriers and five motivations for implementing TQEM in LFI. The paper contributes to the existing knowledge by investigating the implementation of TQEM in different context (i.e., Arab/North African) to the one that the quality and environmental theory developed in. Also, the paper studies all barriers and motivations of TQM and EMS implementation compared with previous studies focusing on few barriers and motivations. The paper provides ideas and insights for LFI managers to develop their implementation in TQEM while also considering quality and environmental issues.