The impact of sustainable manufacturing practices on sustainability performance: Empirical evidence from Malaysia

Abstract

Purpose: Sustainable manufacturing practices are one of the significant environmental initiatives taken by manufacturing industries to preserve the environment and improve the quality of human life while performing manufacturing activities. The emergence of the value creation concept, economic value no longer counts as a single factor for measuring manufacturing performance. Within the sustainability context, the impact of manufacturing activities on the environmental and social aspects should be taken into account as the basis for assessing manufacturing performance, which is called sustainability performance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship of sustainable manufacturing practices with sustainability performance, which considers the environmental, economic and social aspects. Design/methodology/approach: A questionnaire survey is carried out among 443 ISO 14001 certified manufacturing companies in Malaysia. Structural equation modelling is used to evaluate the relationship of sustainable manufacturing practices with sustainability performance. Findings: The findings of this study indicate that manufacturing process is the manufacturing stage that gives the most impact on the improvement of sustainability performance. Hence, it is concluded that manufacturing companies in Malaysia are highly focussed on the production bound when implementing sustainable manufacturing practices. Research limitations/implications: Although this study indicates a good estimation of the proposed model, additional variables might be added to improve the prediction strength of the proposed model such as considering type of industries, economic scale or ownership. Adding the comparison of sustainable manufacturing practices between different countries also a valuable research to investigated. Practical implications: The framework proposed here can also assist manufacturing industries to conduct sustainability assessments by providing elements of sustainability performance and can serve as a guideline to select appropriate sustainable manufacturing practices and to what level the practices need to be improved to leverage companies’ sustainability performance. Originality/value: The framework proposed here can also assist manufacturing industries to conduct sustainability assessments by providing elements of sustainability performance and can serve as a guideline to select appropriate sustainable manufacturing practices and to what level the practices need to be improved to leverage companies’ sustainability performance.