Review Article

An explorative study to enable environmentally conscious manufacturing for an industrial gearbox manufacturing organization

¹ Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 721302, India
² Department of Chemical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Durgapur 713209, India
³ Department of Management Studies, National Institute of Technology, Durgapur 713209, India

^* e-mail: paragbelurmath@gmail.com

Received: 19 September 2014
Accepted: 3 November 2014

Abstract

In recent years, environmentally conscious manufacturing (ECM) has become an important aspect and proactive approach for majority of the manufacturing organizations in India. The reason is that ECM not only helps to produce environment friendly, but also helps to make money by reducing cost or achieving competitive advantage. Industrial gearbox manufacturing organizations have significant environmental impacts as industrial gearbox manufacturing involves several steps which use valuable resources and pollute the environment. Hence, this paper presents an explorative environmental study of an Indian industrial gearbox manufacturing organization. The objective of the current paper is (i) to identify the environmental problems and environmentally conscious manufacturing indicators (ECMI), (ii) to find out the root causes of these problems and (iii) to solve the root causes based on the available state-of-the-art literature. This research work not only reviews the efficient environment friendly manufacturing techniques, but also helps the organization to become eco-efficient by producing environment friendly while making money. First ECMIs selected from literature review, are validated through process mapping. Then these indicators are prioritized using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to find out the critical environmentally conscious manufacturing indicators (CECMI). The sources of CECMIs are identified using either data envelopment analysis (DEA) or direct observation of the available database. Finally, some possible solutions are also addressed in this paper.