Growing social concerns over the environmental externalities associated with business activities are pushing firms to identify activities that create economic value with less environmental impact and to become more eco-efficient. Over the past two decades, researchers have increasingly used frontier efficiency models to evaluate productive efficiency in the presence of undesirable outputs, such...

Poor environmental performance of the manufacturing activities is said to be attributed to the pollutants produced and emitted during the manufacturing process. These pollutants are regarded as undesirable output and cannot be ignored when measuring the efficiency of manufacturing activities. By applying Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Directional Distance Function (DDF) approaches, this st...

To raise the eco-efficiency of the economy, it is important to not only investigate the eco-efficiency of specific products but also to ascertain whether the resources are used effectively throughout the life cycle. In this paper, we address eco-efficiency of agricultural use of phosphorus in Japan in the years 2005, 2010, and 2011. The increase in revenue from crops due to the use of phosphoru...

This paper presents a methodology about how eco-efficiency in extended supply chains (ESCs) can be understood and measured. The extended supply chain includes all processes in the life cycle of a product and the eco-efficiency is measured as the relative environmental and value performance in one ESC compared to other ESCs. The paper is based on a case study of furniture production in Norway. N...

Customer feedback is used to understand customer requirements. Early design phases require the consideration of items including manufacturing, the environment, and sustainability management. Therefore, it is crucial that eco-efficiency is taken into account in the early design phases. Traditionally, eco-efficiency is considered only in terms of eco-design issues, not customer requirements based...

Remanufacturing can bring considerable economic and environmental benefits such as cost saving, conservation of energy and resources, and reduction of emissions. With the increasing awareness of sustainable manufacturing, remanufacturing gradually becomes the research priority. Most studies concentrate on the analysis of influencing factors, or the evaluation of the economic and environmental p...