Benchmarking of sustainability to assess practices and performances of the management of the end of life cycle of electr
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Benchmarking of sustainability to assess practices and performances of the management of the end of life cycle of electronic products: a study of Brazilian manufacturing companies Lucilene Gonçalves da Costa1 · João Carlos Espíndola Ferreira1 · Vikas Kumar2 · Jose Arturo Garza‑Reyes3 Received: 22 April 2020 / Accepted: 10 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The relentless pursuit of lower production costs causes companies to invest in more efficient production systems so that they can remain economically competitive, while the actions focusing on more sustainable operations from an environmental point of view are usually performed to meet the political government regulating environmental control. However, it is common for companies to focus their efforts to minimize the environmental impacts at an early stage of the product life cycle, neglecting sustainability management in the post-use phase. Given the context, this study seeks to develop sustainability indicators that can be used by the electronics industry to assess the level of practice and performance during production that are related to product recovery after the use phase, in order to better understand how companies are acting to reduce the environmental impacts of their products at the end of their life cycle. Initially, critical success factors related to environmental management of the product’s end-of-life are obtained. Then, some of those critical success factors are prioritized, giving rise to the indicators of sustainability used in the benchmarking method. Benchmarking was performed in electronics Brazilian companies, and the data was obtained by means of a questionnaire and interviews. It is concluded from the results that the proposed indicators are suitable for measuring the levels of practices and performance of the participant companies in environmental management at the end of the product life cycle as the indicators were able to portray faithfully the reality of each company. Graphic abstract Practices and performances in the studied Brazilian companies
Keywords Benchmarking · Electronic products · Sustainable manufacturing · Critical success factors · Indicators · End of life cycle
* Vikas Kumar [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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Introduction The increase in industrial production activities has contributed significantly to environmental degradation over the years. Such degradation has led to social awareness, resulting in governments and industries themselves to seek methods to reduce the environmental impacts of industrial production. Many studies propose methods to minimize the waste generated by manufacturing companies, since consumption of products shows a strong tendency to increase (e.g. Tisserant et al. 2017), while product lifespan decreases, caused by factors such as the manufacturer’s planned obsolescence (Diegel et al. 2010), or the consumer’s desire to have the latest launched products (He and Xu 2014). This form o
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