An emergy analysis-based methodology for eco-efficiency evaluation of building manufacturing

Building manufacturing creates product value like building space, and induces severe environmental influence at the same time. The idea of eco-efficiency (EE) can link a product or service value and the corresponding environmental influence together, but there has been little research that implements such idea on building manufacturing, such as the green building rating system of the comprehensive assessment system for building environmental efficiency (CASBEE) in Japan and the EcoEffect in Sweden. This paper proposes an emergy (spelled with an “m”) analysis-based methodology for EE evaluation of building manufacturing, where the building space (in cubic size) and the emergy amount of building manufacturing are selected as the indicators of product value and the environmental influence, respectively. Six residential buildings that include multi-storeys, moderate high-rises and high rises are selected averagely from two Chinese famous cities, namely Beijing and Shanghai. The evaluation results can provide directions to assess environmental influence and thus to heighten the EE of building manufacturing. The EE evaluation result can even be used as the base of a new green building (or eco-building) rating system.     

Setting Priorities within Product-Oriented Environmental Policy

To focus Danish product‐oriented environmental policy, a study applying extended input‐output analysis has been performed, identifying the most important product groups from an environmental perspective. The environmental impacts are analyzed from three different perspectives—the supply perspective, the consumption perspective, and the process perspective—differing primarily in their system delimitation. The top ten environmentally most important product groups (out of 138 industry products and 98 final consumption groups) are listed for each of the three perspectives, using both total environmental impact and environmental impact intensity as ranking principles. The study covers all substances that contribute significantly to the environmental impact categories of global warming, ozone depletion, acidification, nutrient enrichment, photochemical ozone formation, ecotoxicity, human toxicity, and nature occupation. The differences in results between the three perspectives are elaborated and their policy relevance discussed. The top ten product groups account for a surprisingly large share of the total environmental impact of Danish production and consumption (up to 45%, depending upon the perspective). This implies that product‐oriented environmental policy may achieve large improvements by focusing on a rather small number of product groups. Both imported products and products produced for export in general cause more environmental impact than products produced in Denmark for the Danish market. Especially noticeable are the export of meat and ship transport. This leads to the recommendation to include specific policy measures targeting both foreign producers and foreign markets. Because of its relatively large input of labor, public consumption is found to have a much smaller environmental impact intensity than private consumption. The results confirm results of other similar studies, but are more detailed and have lower uncertainty, due to a number of improvements in data and methodology. A short presentation of the methodology is provided as background information, although this is not the main focus of this article.     

Life cycle assessment standards

The newly emerging LCA standards provide an opportunity to review and improve upon the current LCA methodology. As more industrial practitioners enter the arena, the opportunity arises to not only demand environmental improvement from industrial service and product providers but also to fill LCA data gaps. A framework is suggested for improvement in the current LCA framework that focuses on the business relationships of the industrial practitioner. The framework seeks to promote environmental improvement from industrial sectors through the identification of state-of-the-art technologies used throughout a life cycle. Basing LCAs on the best performers in an industry will create a market for a high level of environmental performance, disperse the responsibility of inventory data gathering, and improve upon the advancements already anticipated through the widespread application of LCA.     

Linking Industrial Ecology with Business Strategy: Creating Value for Green Product Design

As organizations practice environmental design, some discover green design positively impacts business performance. This article demonstrates how an organization can employ existing design methods and tools with the Kano technique to craft an environmental product design strategy that enhances its business strategy. These tools expand the toolbox of the industrial ecologist and enable the link between green design and business improvement. The Kano technique was developed in the 1980s to facilitate design of innovative products. We also introduce terminology and concepts such as “voices of the environment,”“environmental knowledge management,”“environmental profile,” and “environmental product attribute” in order to bridge the gap between industrial ecology and business concerns. To demonstrate how an organization can find the synergy between business value and environmental value, this article describes three activities and their corresponding tools and exhibits their use with industry examples. First, we present techniques by which designers can identify and prioritize customers and stakeholders who voice both environmental and business concerns. Second, we describe how voice‐of‐the‐customer translation techniques can be used to efficiently collect and translate data from these customers and stakeholders into critical environmental product and service attributes. Third, we discuss how the Kano technique can be used to connect green design to business strategy by making visible the variety of stakeholder and customer perceptions of these critical environmental attributes. Examples then demonstrate how those perceptions suggest appropriate approaches for integrating the critical environmental attributes into product and business strategy. Finally, we provide examples based on work done with General Electric Medical Systems (GEMS) to illustrate the design of products that improve environmental performance while adding greater perceived value for numerous customers along material‐flow value chains.     

Methodology for developing gate-to-gate Life cycle inventory information

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology evaluates holistically the environmental consequences of a product system or activity, by quantifying the energy and materials used, the wastes released to the environment, and assessing the environmental impacts of those energy, materials and wastes. Despite the international focus on environmental impact and LCA, the quality of the underlying life cycle inventory data is at least as, if not more, important than the more qualitative LCA process. This work presents an option to generate gate-to-gate life cycle information of chemical substances, based on a transparent methodology of chemical engineering process design (an ab initio approach). In the broader concept of a Life Cycle Inventory (LCI), the information of each gate-to-gate module can be linked accordingly in a production chain, including the extraction of raw materials, transportation, disposal, reuse, etc. to provide a full cradle to gate evaluation. The goal of this article is to explain the methodology rather than to provide a tutorial on the techniques used. This methodology aims to help the LCA practitioner to obtain a fair and transparent estimate of LCI data when the information is not readily available from industry or literature. Results of gate-to-gate life cycle information generated using the cited methodology are presented as a case study. It has been our experience that both LCI and LCA information provide valuable means of understanding the net environmental consequence of any technology. The LCI information from this methodology can be used more directly in exploring engineering and chemistry changes to improve manufacturing processes. The LCA information can be used to set broader policy and to look at more macro improvements for the environment.     

Development of environmental performance indicators supported by an environmental information system: Application to the Norwegian defence sector

Environmental performance indicators (EPIs) can be an important tool for evaluating and reporting the integration of environmental practices and tools in the defence sector, ensuring that environmental issues are being consistently and clearly followed into sector activities on a local and national scale. However, proper use of indicators is dependent on a suitable conceptual framework to manage and assess the environmental performance. Furthermore, monitoring is fundamental to environmental efficiency evaluations both to assess adherence to standards and to support management options. The use of EPI assures that a monitoring system for a public sector addresses only the key variables associated with significant environmental impacts and also improves communication with stakeholders. The main objective of this paper is to develop EPIs supported by an environmental information system (EIS), as a tool for environmental efficiency evaluations in the defence sector. To put the proposed approach into practice, the Norwegian defence EIS is used as a data source – a system developed to increase environmental awareness and to promote environmental efficiency, in the reporting of environmental aspects like use of ammunition, generation of waste, energy consumption, fuel consumption, use of chemicals, and water consumption. Use of real data acquired from the EIS is used to test and evaluate the robustness of the public sector's environmental performance indicator conceptual framework (SEPIIS), used to support the developed indicators. The main findings show how an indicator framework can be effectively combined with the use of an EIS designed to process data from a sector's activities, stressing how environmental issues could be integrated into overall public services performance management. The EPI developed for the Norwegian defence allowed to trace the sector's environmental performance, by comparisons with commissions from the Norwegian Ministry of Defence and national goals for GHG emissions, identifying areas for priority response measures. This joined approach of indicators and information systems could be useful to increase and improve environmental ex post and ex ante assessments, reporting and communication of defence activities.     

生物防治稻田与普通稻田水体中浮游植物的生态特征研究

通过对大沙镇生物防治稻田及普通稻田水体中浮游植物的调查研究,共检出藻类112种,其中生物防治稻田中82种,普通稻田中89种.稻田水体中的浮游植物以硅藻、裸藻和绿藻占优势.在普通稻田中,硅藻种类数超过生物防治稻田,其优势度最高的5种藻类中除双对栅藻外,其余4种均为硅藻;而在生物防治稻田中,裸藻种类数高于普通稻田,且其优势度最高的5种藻类中有两种为裸藻.通过比较发现,生物防治稻田水体中浮游生物的密度明显高于普通稻田.对水体浮游植物多样性及均匀度的分析表明,稻田水体中的浮游植物自秧苗插上至干田期间,多样性指数略有上升(主要是由于种类数的增加引起的),而均匀度呈下降趋势.     

基于生命周期视角的产业资源生态管理效益分析——以虚拟共生网络系统为例

资源流代谢失调是造成产业生态环境问题的主要原因之一,对其实施基于共生网络的生态管理是解决问题的一项重要的举措。运用全生命周期的思想构建了产业资源共生网络及其管理框架,并运用全生命周期评价的方法,借助生命周期评价软件GaBi4,分别选取EI99 (Eco-Indicator 99)、CML2001 EP评价体系,以武汉市造纸产业为例,通过设计合理的资源流网络关系及中水、废纸和污泥利用共生路径构建虚拟造纸产业共生网络,对比分析了共生设计系统与原有共生系统的各生态环境影响。并运用市场价值法对共生设计系统的经济效益进行了分析。结果表明:共生设计系统总的环境影响、生态系统质量、人体健康、资源损耗值的环境影响分值分别为1166.445、814.509、148.893、203.045,比原有系统分别减少23.91%、19.15%、46.56%、22.26%;其中富营养化、气候变化的影响分别比原有系统降低56.25%、16.62%。同时共生设计系统通过污水、废纸及污泥的回用,在不考虑市场波动的情况下,可获得1018-7252万元的经济效益。可见,通过构建共生网络的生态管理是提高资源利用效率的有效手段之一,在一定条件下可取得明显的环境和经济效益。     

Extended statistical approaches to modelling spatial pattern in biodiversity in northeast New South Wales. I. Species-level modelling

Statistical modelling of biological survey data in relation to remotely mapped environmental variables is a powerful technique for making more effective use of sparse data in regional conservation planning. Application of such modelling to planning in the northeast New South Wales (NSW) region of Australia represents one of the most extensive and longest running case studies of this approach anywhere in the world. Since the early 1980s, statistical modelling has been used to extrapolate distributions of over 2300 species of plants and animals, and a wide variety of higher-level communities and assemblages. These modelled distributions have played a pivotal role in a series of major land-use planning processes, culminating in extensive additions to the region's protected area system. This paper provides an overview of the analytical methodology used to model distributions of individual species in northeast NSW, including approaches to: (1) developing a basic integrated statistical and geographical information system (GIS) framework to facilitate automated fitting and extrapolation of species models; (2) extending this basic approach to incorporate consideration of spatial autocorrelation, land-cover mapping and expert knowledge; and (3) evaluating the performance of species modelling, both in terms of predictive accuracy and in terms of the effectiveness with which such models function as general surrogates for biodiversity.     

Life Cycle Assessment of a Personal Computer and its Effective Recycling Rate (7 pp)

Background, Aims and Scope Telecommunication and information technology, dramatically emerged during the last decade, has generated environmental problems by accelerating mass production, mass consumption, and mass disposal of personal computers (PCs) in Korea. In addition, it has led the Korean new economy. The Korean government has encouraged researchers and industry to study the environmental impact, adequate disposal treatment, and the reasonable recycling rate of an end-of-life personal computer. The main purpose of this research is to investigate the life cycle environmental impact of PCs and to determine the desirable or feasible recycle rate of an end-of-life PC. An LCA on a PC was performed based on different recycling scenario. Target audiences are new product developers, designers, product recovery managers and environmental policy makers who are interested in the environmental impact of PCs and recycling of end-of-life products. Methods A target product is a Pentium IV personal computer made in Korea in 2001, excluding the monitor and peripheral equipment. The procedure of the LCA followed the ISO14040 series. System boundary includes the entire life cycle of the product, including pre-manufacturing (the electrical parts and components manufacturing), manufacturing, transportation, use, and disposal. The LCI and impact assessment database for a PC was constructed using SIMAPRO version 4.0 software and LCI information was compiled by site-specific data and the Korean national database. The LCA was performed on different recycling scenarios: one being that of the current recycling rate of 46%, and the other being the ideal condition of a 100% recycling rate. Results and Discussion Abiotic depletion, global warming, ecotoxicity, human toxicity, acidification, ozone layer depletion, photo-oxidant formation, and eutrophication are adopted as the impact categories. The pre-manufacturing stage was a significant stage for all of the environmental parameters, besides human toxicity potential. PC manufacturing consists of rather simple processes such as assembly and packaging. For improving the environmental performance of PCs, environmental management approaches of design for the environment and green procurement are recommended. The use stage had a significant potential due to the electricity consumption produced by burning fossil fuel. The disposal stage's contribution to environmental impact was largest in human toxicity, and second largest in ozone layer depletion potential. The PC recycling was shown to inhibit all environmental impacts with the exception of the ozone depletion and ecotoxicity potential. The increase of light oil, nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and deoxidating agent consumption during the recycling process contributes to the environmental impact of ozone and ecotoxicity parameters. Current recovery and recycling technologies should be taken into account for enhancing the benefits of recycling. Anyway, the effectiveness of recycling was highlighted by this study. PC recycling reduces the total environmental impact of the product. The PC recycling is recommended to be raised up to at least 63% in order to reduce the environmental burdens of a PC in other life cycle stages. Conclusion and Recommendation This study implies that design for the environment (DfE) in the product design stage and green procurement are recommended for improving the entire environmental performance of electronic equipment such as PCs. The recycling of waste PCs clearly reduces the environmental burden. There are, however, trade-offs among environmental parameters according to the PC recycling rate. Current recycling methods are not effective in reducing ozone depletion and ecotoxicity environmental impact. The product recovery is another key for efficient recycling. Efficient reverse logistics to collect and transport end-of-life PCs should be taken into account to enhance recycling effects. There were several electrical parts not included in this assessment, due to the unavailability of adequate data. Further studies with more detail and reliable inventories for electrical parts and sub-components are recommended. Furthermore, costs of recycling should also be treated in further research.     

Environmental Implications of Resource Use:Environmental Input-Output Analyses for Germany

In a German case study, environmental input-output analyses (eIOA) combined with NAMEA-type tables were conducted for eleven selected environmental pressure variables. (NAMEA is an acronym for national accounts matrix including environmental accounts.) The analyses were conducted to derive the production-cycle-wide resource use and environmental impact potentials of final-demand product groups. The methodology permits identification and preliminary ranking of 10 product chains along which about two-thirds of German production-born environmental pressures arise. The most relevant product groups are construction work, food, motor vehicles, basic metals, and electricity. The ten product groups are characterized by both high resource requirements and high residual outputs (air emissions, wastes). The EU policy areas of integrated product policy and sustainable use of natural resources may address these product chains as a priority in order to identify and explore the possibility of reducing the environmental impacts from products throughout their life cycles and to decouple environmental impacts from resource use.     

Integration of life cycle assessment in the environmental information system

Background, aim, and scope  As the sustainability improvement becomes an essential business task of industry, a number of companies are adopting IT-based environmental information systems (EIS). Life cycle assessment (LCA), a tool to improve environmental friendliness of a product, can also be systemized as a part of the EIS. This paper presents a case of an environmental information system which is integrated with online LCA tool to produce sets of hybrid life cycle inventory and examine its usefulness in the field application of the environmental management. Main features  Samsung SDI Ltd., the producer of display panels, has launched an EIS called Sustainability Management Initiative System (SMIS). The system comprised modules of functions such as environmental management system (EMS), green procurement (GP), customer relation (e-VOC), eco-design, and LCA. The LCA module adopted the hybrid LCA methodology in the sense that it combines process LCA for the site processes and input–output (IO) LCA for upstream processes to produce cradle-to-gate LCA results. LCA results from the module are compared with results of other LCA studies made by the application of different methodologies. The advantages and application of the LCA system are also discussed in light of the electronics industry. Results and discussion  LCA can play a vital role in sustainability management by finding environmental burden of products in their life cycle. It is especially true in the case of the electronics industry, since the electronic products have some critical public concerns in the use and end-of-life phase. SMIS shows a method for hybrid LCA through online data communication with EMS and GP module. The integration of IT-based hybrid LCA in environmental information system was set to begin in January 2006. The advantage of the comparing and regular monitoring of the LCA value is that it improves the system completeness and increases the reliability of LCA. By comparing the hybrid LCA and process LCA in the cradle-to-gate stage, the gap between both methods of the 42-in. standard definition plasma display panel (PDP) ranges from 1% (acidification impact category) to −282% (abiotic resource depletion impact category), with an average gap of 68.63%. The gaps of the impact categories of acidification (AP), eutrophication (EP), and global warming (GWP) are relatively low (less than 10%). In the result of the comparative analysis, the strength of correlation of three impact categories (AP, EP, GWP) shows that it is reliable to use the hybrid LCA when assessing the environmental impacts of the PDP module. Hybrid LCA has its own risk on data accuracy. However, the risk is affordable when it comes to the comparative LCA among different models of similar product line of a company. In the results of 2 years of monitoring of 42-in. Standard definition PDP, the hybrid LCA score has been decreased by 30%. The system also efficiently shortens man-days for LCA study per product. This fact can facilitate the eco-design of the products and can give quick response to the customer's inquiry on the product's eco-profile. Even though there is the necessity for improvement of process data currently available, the hybrid LCA provides insight into the assessments of the eco-efficiency of the manufacturing process and the environmental impacts of a product. Conclusions and recommendations  As the environmental concerns of the industries increase, the need for environmental data management also increases. LCA shall be a core part of the environmental information system by which the environmental performances of products can be controlled. Hybrid type of LCA is effective in controlling the usual eco-profile of the products in a company. For an industry, in particular electronics, which imports a broad band of raw material and parts, hybrid LCA is more practicable than the classic LCA. Continuous efforts are needed to align input data and keep conformity, which reduces data uncertainty of the system.     

Method for Setting Environmental Targets in Product Development: Incorporating Use‐Phase Impact by Subsystem

In order to address environmental aspects during redesign, the product specification must include related targets that are reachable and challenging. To do so, this article presents a stepwise approach for combining benchmarking information and component impact, out of life cycle assessment (LCA) scaling. This approach requires allocating environmental impacts to each subsystem, which is not commonly done for some life cycle phases in LCAs, most particularly for use phases. This article includes a methodology for allocating such impacts. The underlying criterion is avoiding complex calculations, to make the method more agile. This methodology is presented in a full case study of a complex product: a knuckle boom crane. The case study results in the percentage of impact reduction needed to meet the market average or best competitors. In particular, the results show that the cylinders of the crane have a high contribution to environmental impact, not only because of their weight, but also because of the active power consumed to activate them.     

Developing Markets for Certified Wood Products: Greening the Supply Chain for Construction Materials

A growing worldwide movement is seeking to promote the greening of the construction sector. At the design level, proponents of frameworks such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) seek to motivate designers and building owners to employ environmentally desirable materials. A prominent component of this approach is boosting availability of “green” building materials through programs that will certify to buyers that materials meet environmental standards. For wood products, this has resulted in several forms of “green certification” for forest management. Increasingly large areas of forest are now being certified worldwide. Yet it remains difficult for designers of green buildings, or consumers seeking green furniture, to obtain certified wood products. Many, if not most, of the logs now being harvested on green certified forest land worldwide are not reaching the store shelf with a certified label. Marketing certified wood all the way to the retail shelf has proved to be much harder than initially thought by proponents of certified products. This article explains the sources of these difficulties and outlines an approach to identifying products with high potential for marketing as certified products. Because of complex, multilevel supply chains for many wood products, support is required at all processing and distribution levels for a product to reach the retail customer with its green label. Market participants' purchase size and frequency, basis for product selection, buying influences, and price sensitivity are evaluated to identify product and market approaches likely to increase success rates for certified wood products. The article concludes with recommendations for expanding markets for green building materials.     

Bottom-Up Life-Cycle:Assessment of Product Consumption in Belgium

The present study shows the results and methodology applied to the study of the identification of priority product categories for Belgian product and environmental policy. The main goal of the study was to gather insight into the consumption of products in Belgium and their related life-cycle environmental impacts. The conclusions of this project on the product categories with major environmental contributions can be used to start up working groups involving stakeholders and initiate detailed product studies on the impact reduction potential that could be achieved by means of implementing product policy measures. Several ways of assessing product category environmental impacts and the effects of policy measures have been developed; 'bottom-up' or 'market-life-cycle assessment' is one of these, and we tried this approach for the situation in Belgium. Simplified life-cycle assessment (LCA) studies were conducted for representative average products within each function-based product category and the results were multiplied with market statistics. Using this approach, we found that building construction, building occupancy, and personal transport are among the major categories for Belgium. The major drawbacks of this approach are the system-level limitations and the existence of a broad spectrum of nonharmonized methods and datasets from which a sound preliminary selection had to be made. Consequently, the retrieval and selection of data was very time consuming and due to this we had to accept some major limitations in the study design. Nevertheless, the study has contributed to the development of a methodology for market-LCA and elements that can be picked up in currently ongoing and future work. The study concludes that to improve the feasibility and acceptance of this type of study there is a need for the development of a harmonized methodology on market-LCA, policy-relevant impact indicators as well as a harmonized and stakeholder-agreed-upon LCA databases.     

Prospective Environmental Analyses of Emerging Technology: A Critique,a Proposed Methodology,and a Case Study on Incremental Sheet Forming

Prospective environmental assessment of emerging technology is necessary in order to inform designers of beneficial changes early in a technology's development, and policy makers looking to fund projects and nudge manufacturers toward the most sustainable application of a technology. Existing analyses often have shortcomings such as failing to consider the environmental impacts in all stages of a product's life cycle; implicitly assuming that the emerging technology will be cost‐effective wherever it is technically viable; and assuming optimistic application scenarios that discontinue long‐established trends in human behavior. In this article, we propose a new approach, complementary to the prospective and anticipatory life cycle assessment literature, addressing the above concerns and attempting to make sense of the large uncertainties inherent in such analyses by using distributions to model all the inputs. The paper focuses on emerging manufacturing technologies, such as incremental sheet forming (ISF), but the issues examined are also applicable to new end‐use products, such as autonomous vehicles. This paper makes use of approaches (such as Bass modeling and product cannibalization considerations) familiar to those in the business community who anticipate market diffusion of a new technology and the effect on existing technology sales. The proposed methodology is demonstrated by estimating the potential environmental impacts in the U.S. car industry by 2030 of an emerging double‐sided ISF process. Energy and cost models of ISF and drawing are used to estimate potential mean savings of around 100 TJ_primary and 60 million U.S. dollars per year by 2030.     

Life cycle assessment evaluation of green product labeling systems for residential construction

Purpose

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool that can be utilized to holistically evaluate novel trends in the construction industry and the associated environmental impacts. Green labels are awarded by several organizations based on single or multiple attributes. The use of multi-criteria labels is a good start to the labeling process as opposed to single criteria labels that ignore a majority of impacts from products. Life cycle thinking, in theory, has the potential to improve the environmental impacts of labeling systems. However, LCA databases currently are lacking in detailed information about products or sometimes provide conflicting information.

Method

This study compares generic and green-labeled carpets, paints, and linoleum flooring using the Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability (BEES) LCA database. The results from these comparisons are not intuitive and are contradictory in several impact categories with respect to the greenness of the product. Other data sources such as environmental product declarations and ecoinvent are also compared with the BEES data to compare the results and display the disparity in the databases.

Results

This study shows that partial LCAs focused on the production and transportation phase help in identifying improvements in the product itself and improving the manufacturing process but the results are uncertain and dependent upon the source or database. Inconsistencies in the data and missing categories add to the ambiguity in LCA results.

Conclusions

While life cycle thinking in concept can improve the green labeling systems available, LCA data is lacking. Therefore, LCA data and tools need to improve to support and enable market trends.     

How Political Connections Affect Corporate Environmental Performance: The Mediating Role of Green Subsidies

This study investigates the relationship between political connections and corporate environmental performance, and examines the role of government green subsidies on this relationship within the current Chinese context. Using data from publicly traded private manufacturing firms, empirical results show that politically connected firms are significantly more likely to obtain green subsidies than non-connected firms. Assisted by green subsidies, firms with political connections show better environmental performance than those without. Our findings reveal the mechanism by which corporate political connections influence environmental performance.     

Using the Fuzzy DEMATEL to Determine Environmental Performance: A Case of Printed Circuit Board Industry in Taiwan

The method by which high-technology product manufacturers balance profits and environmental performance is of crucial concern for governments and enterprises. To examine the environmental performance of manufacturers, the present study applied Fuzzy-DEMATEL model to examine environmental performance of the PCB industry in Taiwan. Fuzzy theory was employed to examine the environmental performance criteria of manufacturers and analyse fuzzy linguistics. The fuzzy-DEMATEL model was then employed to assess the direction and level of interaction between environmental performance criteria. The core environmental performance criteria which were critical for enhancing environmental performance of the PCB industry in Taiwan were identified and presented. The present study revealed that green design (a1), green material procurement (a2), and energy consumption (b3) constitute crucial reason criteria, the core criteria influencing other criteria, and the driving factors for resolving problems.