Sustainable green management system and a new green index
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Date
2018
Authors
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Publisher
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
Abstract
The current drive towards sustainability is putting pressure on organisations worldwide to implement procedures to manage the elements of sustainability for an organisation that include emissions, effluent discharge, waste disposal and energy efficiency. Even though these green elements can be managed, monitored and analysed in an integrated manner using some common resources and information, they are typically handled piecemeal under different types of management standards; and quite often, as ad-hoc projects as opposed to programs. Moreover, current available green assessment tools, which utilise qualitative, credit-based rating system have several limitations. Firstly, they can only provide a relative measure of the greenness of a facility. Secondly, there is the possibility that the ratings assigned may differ from one user to another, depending on the needs and priorities of an organisation, a country, or a region. This thesis presents the development of an integrated green management framework called the sustainable green management system (SGMS). A systematic, integrated and efficient approach for collecting, monitoring, analysing and managing information and resources via the SGMS will not only lead to organisational sustainability, but also have the potential to save ample resources, remove significant redundancies, promote cleaner production and enhance the profitability and efficiency of an organisation. This thesis also presents the development of a new green index (GI) as a tool for assessing the level of greenness of a facility that overcomes the current available green assessment tool limitations. The use of stock market composite index as a basis for the GI development has enabled an established tool for assessing stock market performances to progress into the domain of facility and process management. The SGMS framework was successfully implemented on a chiller plant case study, whereas a teaching facility and wastewater treatment plant were used as case studies to demonstrate how the application SGMS and GI help organisation achieve sustainability goals. The results of the application of the SGMS framework on the teaching facility management show a reduction of RM84,000 on salary cost, 20% lower implementation cost and a reduction of 240 working hours on data collection. The reduction in GI reflects the actual overall quantative impact of improvement on the environment (13% for the facility and 36% for process activities) with only a single indicator to represent multiple green elements
Description
Thesis (PhD. (Polymer Engineering))
Keywords
Sustainable design, Environmental auditing, Environmental impact analysis