2015/11/25 by Serkan Gumus, Serkan Gümüş, Gökhan Eğilmez +4 · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Engineering · Environmental Science · #Environmental Impact and Sustainability #Sustainable Building Design and Assessment #Sustainable Supply Chain Management
paper · doi:10.1057/jors.2015.88
openalex publication_date 2015/11/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In this paper, the effect of weighting strategies on sustainability performance assessment is addressed. Eco-efficiency is used as the main metric for sustainability performance evaluation. An integrated input-output life cycle assessment (LCA) and multi criteria decision making (MCDM) approach is employed. The US manufacturing sectors’ LCA results are used in conjunction with the proposed MCDM framework to perform the eco-efficiency evaluation of 276 US manufacturing sectors. Five environmental impact categories are considered as the negative factors, namely: greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, water withdrawal, hazardous waste generation and toxic releases into air and the economic output of each manufacturing sector is considered to be the positive output. To study the overall impact of different weighting strategies; twenty weighting scenarios are designed. Five pairs of weights considered for the overall economic versus environmental impacts along with four specific weighting strategies based on Harvard, SAB, EPP and Equal weighting for each pair. According to the results of the statistical analysis, it is concluded that the weighing strategies applied to the overall environmental impacts and economic outputs cause statistically significant differences in the eco-efficiency scores.