Modelling barriers to the adoption of industrial sustainability measures

Abstract

Sustainability is constantly gaining relevance among industrial decision makers, policy makers and scholars. In order to be sustainable, firms need to implement industrial sustainability measures, however there are many barriers to doing this. This work is based on a review of literature on barriers to the areas of occupational health and safety, eco efficiency, energy efficiency and to sustainability, and contributes to industrial sustainability research by presenting a novel, integrated theoretical model of barriers to the implementation of sustainability measures. The model encompasses previous literature review contributions and is intended to characterize and evaluate barriers to the adoption of industrial sustainability measures in all its areas. We have conducted a preliminary validation of the model investigating eight northern Italian manufacturing firms, looking at its ability to represent barriers to sustainability, usefulness and ease of use. We conducted semi-structured interviews to people responsible of the different areas of industrial sustainability, complemented by questionnaires and secondary materials. Results show a positive overall judgment of the model by all the interviewees. Moreover, the model was able to be applied to issues deriving from different perspectives and different areas of industrial sustainability. The findings can help firms and policy makers overcome barriers and they also provide insight into the different perspectives on the adoption of industrial sustainability measures than can be used to promote their adoption

Broadening to sustainability the perspective of industrial decision-makers on the energy efficiency measures adoption: some empirical evidence

“…We presented the model of barriers to each interviewee, describing every single barrier. Interviewee was provided with a list of industrial sustainability measures (we adopted the one proposed by Trianni et al (2017)) and asked to identify, among the measures, those that were considered for adoption within their firm. For these measures, interviewee was asked to evaluate, using the model proposed, the main barriers faced for their adoption and to discuss possible additional measures missing from the list.…”

“…Firms cannot avoid such aspects when implementing EEMs. Nevertheless, too little attention has been so paid hitherto to analyse the negative consequences that may arise from the implementation of an EEM (Trianni et al 2017), thus extending the perspective on industrial sustainability beyond energy efficiency performance.…”

“…Sustainability has been conceptualized by Elkington (1998) using the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) as the intersection of three different pillars, namely, environmental, economic and social. Focusing on an industrial context we refer to industrial sustainability (Trianni et al 2017), that it is related to all those actions that can be undertaken the production plant (and not just the production line), and that are referred to the levels of material, product, process, plant and systems of production (Tonelli et al 2013), and integrated into normal operations (Evans et al 2009). Industrial sustainability has been often identified in literature with the areas of occupational health and safety (OHS) (Pagell and Gobeli 2009), and eco efficiency (Gimenez et al 2012), with a growing relevance of energy efficiency issue within eco efficiency (Pehlken et al 2015).…”

“…Indeed, since the impact of the EEMs on the operations and on the other areas of industrial sustainability has been largely recognized, it would be interesting to broad our perspective and understand if the issues related to the non-adoption of the measures can be related to industrial sustainability areas other than energy efficiency. For this specific purpose, authors recently developed an integrated model for the evaluation of barriers to the adoption of measures to improve industrial sustainability performance (Trianni et al 2017). Among those, for sure EEMs can be considered.…”

Investigating the Relationships Between Organizational Change, Organizational Climate, and Organizational Performance

“…Specifically, there have been some past studies on organizational change for sustainability performance in the manufacturing sector with focus on examining the barriers to change (Neri, Cagno, Di Sebastiano, & Trianni, 2018;Thomas-Seale, Kirkman-Brown, Attallah, Espino, & Shepherd, 2018;Trianni, Cagno, & Neri, 2017). However, organizational change becomes a driver of sustainable performance in the metal manufacturing industry (Feng, Huang, & Wang, 2018;Orji, 2019).…”