Sustainability-related Criteria Research Articles

The Influence of Sustainability Marketing, Corporate Social Responsibility, Ethical Branding, and Green Consumerism on Brand Equity and Market Position in the Fashion Industry

In an effort to break into foreign markets, this study looks into how brand equity and market position are affected by sustainability marketing, corporate social responsibility (CSR), ethical branding, and green consumerism in the Indonesian fashion sector. Data obtained from 197 Indonesian fashion customers was subjected to a quantitative analysis. The associations between the variables were examined using Partial Least Squares (PLS) 3 and structural equation modeling (SEM). The findings show a strong positive correlation between brand equity and market position and sustainability-related criteria (green consumerism, CSR, sustainability marketing, and ethical branding). The results highlight how crucial sustainability and ethical branding are from a strategic standpoint for Indonesian fashion firms looking to gain a competitive edge and become more visible in the international fashion scene.

Consumer Behavior and Sustainability in the Construction Industry—Relevance of Sustainability-Related Criteria in Purchasing Decision

The construction industry significantly contributes to global greenhouse gas emissions and consumption of raw materials, and is thus under intense pressure to become more sustainable. Despite the ever-increasing availability of sustainable solutions, they do not seem to be widely adopted. As key decision makers in the early planning stage of a construction project, end consumers strongly impact sustainable development. However, their knowledge of sustainability-related criteria and their influence on purchasing decisions within the German construction industry is not yet sufficiently well established. Therefore, this study aims to determine the effects of sustainability-related aspects on the purchasing behavior of private individuals, as end consumers in the German construction industry. A quantitative online survey involving 306 participants was utilized to determine their understanding of the term “sustainability” and how they identify and measure the sustainability of a building product. Our results indicate that consumers have a fundamental interest in sustainable building products; however, they lack a holistic view of the concept of sustainability. With the focus on environmental aspects, social and economic aspects tend to be neglected. Since private individuals rarely make purchasing decisions in the building product sector, it is the task of the entire construction industry to establish a system in which consumers can quickly and easily obtain understandable information about sustainable products. Consumers need support from experts to understand and drive sustainable development in the construction industry.

An Adaptive ANP & ELECTRE IS-Based MCDM Model Using Quantitative Variables

The analytic network process (ANP) is a discrete multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method conceived as a generalization of the traditional analytic hierarchical process (AHP) to address its limitations. ANP allows the incorporation of interdependence and feedback relationships between the criteria and alternatives that make up the system. This implies much more complexity and intervention time, which reduces the expert’s ability to make accurate and consistent judgments. The present paper takes advantage of the usefulness of this methodology by formulating the model for exclusively quantitative variables, simplifying the decision problem by resulting in fewer paired comparisons. Seven sustainability-related criteria are used to determine, among four design alternatives for a building structure, which is the most sustainable over its life cycle. The results reveal that the number of questions required by the conventional AHP is reduced by 92%. The weights obtained between the AHP and ANP groups show significant variations of up to 71% in the relative standard deviation of some criteria. This sensitivity to subjectivity has been implemented by combining the ANP-ELECTRE IS methods, allowing the expert to reflect the view of the decision problem with greater flexibility and accuracy. The sensitivity of the results on different methods has been analyzed.

Framework for increasing sustainability of factory systems by generative layout design

The structure of factory systems has a long-term impact on the productivity and performance of production systems. With an increasing relevance of decentral renewable energy sources, factory planning becomes more complex due to an increase of decision criteria and possible solutions, but ecological impacts are also growingly depending on early structure decisions. However, decisions during planning processes in industry are still based on experience, qualitative assessments and discussions. Thus, planning results may not exploit the potential of the available solution space, nor do they allow quantitative traceability of layout configurations.Generative Design (GD) gained popularity in topology optimization and building construction and provides promising opportunities for complex design tasks. Not least with the increasing relevance of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in manufacturing, new methods and technologies for optimization become available to factory planners. Hence, the paper describes options for enhanced decisions in sustainable factory layout planning. Therefore, it provides a quick overview on optimization and GD in layout planning as well as the relation towards BIM and sustainability assessment. Based on this, possible extensions of optimization targets and boundaries towards energy and sustainability-related criteria is elaborated. Afterwards, necessary and potential data acquisition with the openBIM-related Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is discussed. The paper concludes with an outlook towards further investigations on the overlap of layout design, BIM and sustainability.

Healthcare Information System using DEMATEL Method

In India, the most popular agricultural products include wheat, barley, fruits, vegetables, and fodder. Socioeconomic sustainability in agriculture is dependent on the weather. A farmer can make more money at a reduced cost by increasing productivity through wise crop selection. Based on available natural resources and cost Sort out crop alternatives, Promote sustainable agricultural practices and Identify the best suitable crop a multi-criteria decision-making model (MCDM) can be used. The most crucial factors are taken into consideration to determine if agricultural activities are sustainable. This study comprised four sustainability-related criteria. Using MCDM for sustainable agricultural practices in India The research focuses on developing the model. The most suited crop was determined using MCDM approaches, then Soybean, Apple, Rice, Corn, and Cucumber. And fruits emerged as a high-yielding crop. Such a system also applies to other areas, and for sustainable agricultural practices can be further extended to various crops. Water to develop an appropriate agricultural policy in India, The Ministry of Environment and Agriculture is anticipating assistance from the study. Corn is first place in wind-solar hybrid farm and the last rank is cucumber.

The assessment of a smart farming system in VIKOR methods

In India, the most popular agricultural products include wheat, barley, fruits, vegetables, and fodder. Socioeconomic sustainability in agriculture is dependent on the weather. A farmer can make more money at a reduced cost by increasing productivity through wise crop selection. Based on available natural resources and cost Sort out crop alternatives, Promote sustainable agricultural practices and Identify the best suitable crop a multi-criteria decision-making model (MCDM) can be used. The most crucial factors are taken into consideration to determine if agricultural activities are sustainable. This study comprised four sustainability-related criteria. Using MCDM for sustainable agricultural practices in India The research focuses on developing the model. The most suited crop was determined using MCDM approaches, then Soybean, Apple, Rice, Corn, and Cucumber. And fruits emerged as a high-yielding crop. Such a system also applies to other areas, and for sustainable agricultural practices can be further extended to various crops. Water to develop an appropriate agricultural policy in India, The Ministry of Environment and Agriculture is anticipating assistance from the study. Corn is first place in wind-solar hybrid farm and the last rank is cucumber.

A goal programming model to study the impact of R&D expenditures on sustainability-related criteria: the case of Kazakhstan

PurposeMost countries face important economic, social and environmental challenges and are strongly committed to invest in research and development (R&D) activities to help support the long-run economic sustainable growth. This paper aims to extend the previous research on macro-economic growth models and introduces endogenous variables to determine the amount of investments in R&D activities.Design/methodology/approachThe model considers four different criteria and six economic sectors and aims at finding the optimal allocation of labor across different sectors. The model also endogenously determines the amount of investments in pollution abatement activities together with energy-related R&D efforts. The paper presents an application to the case of Kazakhstan, an emerging Asian country, that aims to become one of the top 30 most developed countries in the world by 2050.FindingsThe model shows the limits of the Kazakh agenda that identified too ambitious goals as the country has to go through a sociotechnical transition that involves a range of modifications in institutional structures, together with changes in user practices and the technological dimension. Kazakhstan should invest more in R&D activities able to develop sustainable energy sources to face the current electricity consumption demand and to reduce the greenhouse gas emission in the future.Originality/valueThe paper provides valuable knowledge for researchers and policy makers interested in the impact of R&D on the long-run economic sustainable growth.

Evaluating urban land use efficiency with interacting criteria: An empirical study of cities in Jiangsu China

The evaluation of urban land use efficiency (ULUE) plays an important role in achieving the sustainable use of land resources. Illustrated with an empirical study on the evaluation of ULUE of 13 cities in Jiangsu, China, this paper develops an efficiency evaluation approach for measuring the ULUE with respect to interacting sustainability-related criteria, using bipolar measurement. The approach incorporates the merits of the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method, a new causal-effect analysis process, the Bi-TOPSIS method, and convergence models. As such, this paper addresses three important issues: (a) how to identify key criteria and their interactions for evaluating the ULUE of cities; (b) how to obtain the ULUE performances of cities, with benchmarks that clearly demarcate ‘satisfactory’ from ‘unsatisfactory’ performances, and (c) how to measure the dispersion of the ULUE performances across cities over time. The results from the empirical study suggest that the ULUE of most Jiangsu cities is below the city planner’s expectation. The ULUE of Central Jiangsu cities is better than their neighboring cities, and the cities with low ULUE tend to catch up with higher ULUE cities. However, the gaps between their ULUE performances will still exist. Each city’s ULUE performance can only converge to its own steady state over time. To help cities achieve a better ULUE performance, policy suggestions are recommended.

Sustainability-informed multi-criteria decision support framework for ranking and prioritization of pavement sections

Abstract Ranking and prioritizing pavement infrastructure for maintenance and rehabilitation have become major undertakings for several departments of transportation around the globe. This is a complex decision-making problem because multiple and conflicting criteria can contribute to the assessment. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques evaluate the trade-off between several quantitative and qualitative criteria and facilitate complex decision-making. This research introduces a framework based on MCDA to support pavement management decision making, while quantifying emerging sustainability-related factors such as safety, noise, and pollution in the decision-making process. The framework features include 1) identifying pavement management main decision elements: objectives, criteria, and attributes by detailing the problem with a five-level hierarchy structure; 2) employing combined analytic hierarchy process and multi-attribute utility theory to develop representative set of utility functions; and 3) ranking and prioritizing large networks of pavement sections while incorporating sustainability-related criteria. Data used to assess the decision criteria and develop the utility functions is extracted by means of a questionnaire survey completed by professionals working in the field of pavement management. The proposed method is applied to a case study consisting of ten pavement sections extracted from the long-term pavement performance database, wherein the sections are ranked based on their attributes. Sensitivity analysis is performed to evaluate the impact of the different criteria on the ranking process. The proposed method has shown potential in ranking pavement networks based on the identified criteria. Future work can test the performance of the proposed methodology with a full-scale pavement network and apply it to other civil infrastructure assets to evaluate its performance with different types of projects.

Key contractor selection criteria for green construction projects in the UAE

Selecting the appropriate contractor is of paramount importance to the success of any construction project. This is even more important to green construction projects. There is a noticeable surge in the number of green construction projects. Green construction projects require contractors that have certain capabilities in addition to the traditional capabilities. This article highlights the key criteria for selecting contractors for green construction projects. Twenty criteria were identified based on literature review. These criteria were categorized into five groups: firm characteristics, firm record, commercial and technical bid, environmental and socio-economic. A survey was then developed and sent to professionals from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The respondents evaluated the selection criteria using pair-wise comparison using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Forty-eight responses were collected. The results show that the top five criteria are the bid price, energy management, technical bid, proposed time and water management. The results show that sustainability-related criteria (environmental and socio-economic groups) are important with a combined weight of 0.386.

Healthy and Sustainable Hospital Evaluation—A Review of POE Tools for Hospital Assessment in an Evidence-Based Design Framework

Hospitals are complex, high-performance systems that demand continuous quality improvement. Several instruments evaluate the organizational or clinical qualities but very few focus on the built environment. The purpose of this paper is to compare and review the recent tools able to assess the hospital built environment and test how they measure health, sustainability, or both through Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE). A literature review has been conducted in the field of hospital quality assessment and 13 POE instruments have been included and analyzed through Ulrich’s Evidence-Based Design (EBD) framework. The percentage and the content of health or sustainability-related criteria have been compared and further discussed. Health related criteria the most recent tools are used three times more than in the tools developed in the nineties. The most used EBD criteria are safety enhancement (n = 131; 14%) and visual environment (n = 119; 13%). Although sustainability remains a relevant issue, today, growing attention is dedicated to the impact of built environment on occupant’s health. Further investigation is needed to understand the effectiveness of those instruments in practice.

Sustainable District Cooling Systems: Status, Challenges, and Future Opportunities, with Emphasis on Cooling-Dominated Regions

A review of current and future district cooling (DC) technologies, operational, economic, and environmental aspects, and analysis and optimization methodologies is presented, focusing on the demands of cooling-dominated regions. Sustainable energy sources (i.e., renewable, waste/excess electricity and heat, natural/artificial cold) and cooling/storage technology options with emphasis on heat-driven refrigeration, and their integrations in published DC design and analysis studies are reviewed. Published DC system analysis, modeling, and optimization methodologies are analyzed in terms of their objectives, scope, sustainability-related criteria, and key findings. The current and future development of DC in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, a major developing cooling-dominated market, is examined more specifically in terms of current and future energy sources and their use, and economic, environmental, and regulatory aspects, with potential technical and non-technical solutions identified to address regional DC sustainability challenges. From the review of published DC design and analysis studies presented, collective research trends in key thematic areas are analyzed, with suggested future research themes proposed towards the sustainability enhancement of DC systems in predominantly hot climates.

Evaluating WEEE recycling innovation strategies with interacting sustainability-related criteria

Abstract Evaluating innovation strategies plays an essential role for supporting sustainable development of the waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) recycling industry. This requires the incorporation of the sustainability concept into the strategy evaluation process, which becomes complicated when sustainability-related evaluation criteria have complementary and substitutive interactions. This paper proposes a novel framework to facilitate systematic identification of sustainability-related criteria by integrating the triple-bottom-line (TBL) principle of sustainability and the model of benefits, opportunities, costs, and risks (BOCR). A capacity-based multicriteria decision making (MCDM) approach is developed to evaluate innovation strategies with respect to interacting sustainability-related criteria. Equipped with a new weighting model for interacting criteria on a multi-level hierarchy, the approach can obtain an overall contribution value for each innovation strategy. To illustrate the BOCR-TBL framework and the capacity-based MCDM approach, an empirical study on an innovation strategy evaluation problem of an Australian WEEE recycling company is conducted. This paper makes conceptual and methodological contributions to sustainability and MCDM research and contributes to the WEEE recycling industry by providing a structured methodology for innovation strategy evaluation.

Public Procurement Incentives for Sustainable Design Services: Swedish Experiences

Abstract When procuring building design services, public clients may provide incentives for the development of design tools and management practices that lead to more sustainable buildings. Procedures for selecting design professionals, including the choice of contract award criteria, can be analysed as the outcome of external and internal factors that influence procuring units. This investigation studies how the selection procedures that Swedish municipal clients rely on when procuring services from architectural and engineering consultants provide incentives for environmentally sustainable design management. Questionnaire responses from 93 Swedish municipalities show that a minority include sustainability-related criteria in tender assessments. Environmental management systems were a criterion for 30% of the respondents, while only 11% regularly used life cycle cost as a criterion. More than half of all municipalities were reported to have a general policy for services procurement, and these policies us...

Sustainable Standard-Setting, Climate Change and the TBT Agreement

The increased importance of environmental protection led to the introduction of sustainability-related criteria in standard-setting practices. A discomfort with the functioning, working methods and certain rigidities of the global standardizing bodies such as the ISO led to a mushrooming of a new generation of private standard-setters at the transnational level that wanted to have a more direct influence over global production and supply chains. Many of these initiatives started as coalitions of relatively powerful downstream retailers or as domestic hybrid initiatives that went global due to their good reputation in setting standards for business conduct. Against this background, this paper reviews the current landscape of voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) globally as a means to organize, coordinate and manage efforts for corporate responsibility as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation. As these schemes grow in prominence, their effects on trade flows also become more visible and sometimes even worrisome. The paper analyses in particular whether the rules set out in the WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) and the Code of Good Practice can tame this increasingly important form of transnational rule-making.

Including Sustainability Criteria in Architectural Completion: A Critical Case Study of Current Practices

The Architectural competition announcements in Austria, as well as in most other European countries, regularly mention sustainability as a fundamental factor for decision-making. The consideration of energy performance, environmental performance of materials (embodied energy, reuse or recycling potential, toxicity), natural ventilation, and daylight availability are typically mentioned in the list of project requirements. In this context, the present contribution considers three actual architectural competition cases. Thereby, we investigated the kinds and depth of sustainability-related criteria as included in the competition announcements (e.g., hard versus soft requirements, qualitative versus quantitative benchmarks) . Moreover, we explored the level to which competition entries actually responded to the sustainability-related competition criteria. Thus, the submission materials (project narratives, posters and simple calculations if existing) available to the jury were analysed in detail. Toward this end, two approaches were selected: A qualitative approach focused on the use of certain terminology within the documentation of the projects. The second approach took certain numeric indicators into consideration such as heating demand and OI3 Index (sustainability). In those cases where the indicator values were not submitted by the participants, they were calculated by the authors based on available documentation. The study implies the need for a reconsideration of the process of formulating architectural competitions and evaluating the related submissions. It appears that currently the sustainability-related requirements in competition documentations do not lead to entries, which provide sufficient information for accountable jury evaluation. Rather, alternative and/or additional comprehensive indicators of sustainability and ecological performance must be included in a clear and systematic fashion in architectural competition narratives.

Public Procurement Incentives for Sustainable Design Services: Swedish Experiences

When procuring building design services, public clients may provide incentives for the development of design tools and management practices that lead to more sustainable buildings. Procedures for selecting design professionals, including the choice of contract award criteria, can be analysed as the outcome of external and internal factors that influence procuring units. This investigation studies how the selection procedures that Swedish municipal clients rely on when procuring services from architectural and engineering consultants provide incentives for environmentally sustainable design management. Questionnaire responses from 93 Swedish municipalities show that a minority include sustainability-related criteria in tender assessments. Environmental management systems were a criterion for 30% of the respondents, while only 11% regularly used life cycle cost as a criterion. More than half of all municipalities were reported to have a general policy for services procurement, and these policies usually include environmental sustainability. However, these policies are not always followed when procuring construction-related services. Smaller municipalities are less likely to have a general policy. Consequently, incentive effects for design service firms are probably weak. Better skills and provider-selection methods among clients are needed for rewarding sustainable design practices more strongly.

Analysis of irrigation systems using sustainability-related criteria.

Sustainable agricultural development as a desired goal in irrigation management is a result of recent public awareness of the scarcity of water for food production. In order to incorporate sustainability-related criteria in the analysis of irrigation systems, the present study aims at introducing environmental indices that represent irrigation water conservation and satisfactory production and income for farmers under stress conditions. An experiment was conducted in Chania, Greece, during the irrigation periods of 1989 and 1990. The irrigation water delivered to 40 experimental plots and the relevant soil moisture content at the root zone were recorded. The data, collected in real time, were used for the calculation of the corresponding environmental indices. The variation of indices in time and space was high, and demonstrated that up to 13% of water was delivered to crops, 82% was yield loss, and 84% was economic return. The study indicated that environmental indices could be easily computed by means of routinely collected data, and could also be incorporated into decision-making approaches, such as compromise programming, in order to develop policies for irrigation water allocation.