Assessment of Overall SCP State of the Company: New Integrated Sustainability Index ISCP

Abstract

The encouragement of sustainable consumption and production (SCP) in order to continuously improve the well-being of present and future generations is the most important goal stated in the European Union (EU) Sustainable Development Strategy, which was renewed in 2006.

The challenge for every company on the way to SCP is not only to use appropriate methods and measures to solve their specific sustainability problems, but, first of all, to select appropriate performance indicators and implement an effective sustainability performance evaluation system. It may be useful to apply an integrated indicator as a single comparable index, reducing the number of sustainability decision-making criteria that need to be considered.

However, despite various approaches to create frameworks and methodologies for the development of integrated sustainability indicators that measure, monitor and assess the progress of an enterprise towards sustainability, there is still no comprehensive framework for integrated sustainability assessment of the overall company state on the basis of manufacturing processes, products/services as well as relationship with various stakeholders.

An algorithm is here presented in respect of this demand. This algorithm offers methodical suggestions to assess the customers’ opinion about the presence of company’s environmental and social sustainability activities and initiatives, to identify and select most appropriate sustainability indicators, to determine their significance according to analytic hierarchy process (AHP), and to solve the most important sustainability problems in 3 aforementioned levels by adapting most suitable tools. The final suggestions are based on the values of 3 sub-indices of a new integrated index for the overall assessment of the SCP state in the company, I_SCP.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.erem.71.3.11482