Benchmarking manufacturing industries based on green practices

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to develop a statistically reliable and valid model of performance measures (PMs) to observe the environmental behavior of different enterprises; second, at benchmarking the enterprises based on their green practices.

A PM model has been proposed using an empirical analysis of manufacturing industry. The developed model has been tested using structural equation modeling technique. The level of green manufacturing (GM) performance in different sectors and sizes of Indian manufacturing industry has been studied and benchmarked using hierarchical cluster analysis with one-way ANOVA.

The results indicate that top management commitment and product design are the root PMs for the success of GM practices. It has been found that chemical, automotive, food and pharmaceutical industries are the high performing sectors. It has also been found that large scale enterprises are performing better than medium-sized enterprises which are doing better than small and micro enterprises in GM practices.

The indicators/variables in questionnaire are subjective in nature and collected data are from Indian manufacturing organizations only.

The governments, trade bodies and NGOs can use the proposed model for measurement of green performance of any manufacturing industry. The benchmarking can be used by the different policy influencing and making agencies to develop future policies for the improvement. The industry can also use the benchmarking for its peer performance improvement.

The major novelty of the paper is benchmarking the green performance of manufacturing industries based on the different sectors and sizes using empirical investigation. The level of GM performance in different sectors and sizes of industries has been studied and benchmarked using hierarchical cluster analysis with one-way ANOVA.