1st September 1998 - 31 August 2002
Industrial Case Studentship sponsored by Unilever and the White Rose Faraday
This thesis focuses on the identification of a core set of indicators measuring progress towards sustainable development for the packaging industry. Supply chain and life cycle management literature suggests that for a company wishing to develop sustainable packaging, it may consider a framework outlining a method for setting about the selection of measures appropriate to the particular industrial sector.
Based on literature integrating (i) state-of-the-art ‘beyond compliance’ environmental management approaches with (ii) sustainable development concepts for business, a methodological framework is development to facilitate the decision-making processes involved in the selection and use of indicators. The research empirically tests a number of approaches to examine those particularly suited for application at the corporate level.
The thesis also aims to identify the corporate conditions necessary for the development of a framework for selecting and ultimate using sustainable development indicators to improve corporate sustainability performance. This involves the study of factors determining the range of ‘issues of concern’ identified by companies as potentially effecting packaging sustainability, including level of understanding of the concepts and principles of sustainable development. The issues identified ultimately determine the range of indicators selected for measurement of packaging sustainability. Therefore it is crucial to develop a multi-disciplinary and holistic approach to identify at the outset a range of stakeholder with differing concerns before decision-makers can be engaged in the process of selecting indicators.
Deliberative processes and semi-structured interviews are some of the techniques deployed to (i) determine packaging industry’s ‘issues of concern’ regarding primarily the environmental and social sustainability of packaging and (ii) for the selection of indicators.
As part of the analysis, one useful insight will be examining how different stakeholder groups differentiate between differing issues, with the potential for developing sub-sets of indicators for measuring packaging sustainability at differentiated stages of the supply chain.
Finally, the barriers to the operationalisation of indicators at the corporate level are examined to identify policy and strategic initiatives that may foster a proactive approach to measuring packaging sustainability. This involves a brief study of institutional behaviours that may constrain or enhance the development of measurements of progress towards sustainable packaging, and how these behaviours vary according to the organisation of the corporation developing the indicators.