Business sustainability methodology for European manufacturing SMEs
Dimache, Aurora Mitchell, Sinéad O'Dowd, Paul
Dimache, Aurora
Mitchell, Sinéad
O'Dowd, Paul
Loading...
Repository DOI
Publication Date
2011-06-28
Type
Conference Paper
Downloads
Citation
Dimache, Aurora, Mitchell, Sinéad, & O'Dowd, Paul. (2011). Business sustainability methodology for European manufacturing SMEs. Paper presented at the 1st International Conference on Sustainable Intelligent Manufacturing, Leiria, Portugal, 28 June - 01 July.
Abstract
SMEs find it difficult to deal with environmental issues due mainly to their limited resources in terms of money, people and time. Our research also identified other barriers to engaging SMEs in environmental improvement activities, such as lack of awareness of their impact on the environment, belief that any measure regarding improvement of environmental performance means higher cost and insufficient access to environmental information, tools, training, information on available funding and incentives. In response, the FutureSME team has developed the Business Sustainability framework which is intended to support manufacturing SMEs in four key areas: cutting costs, gaining a competitive advantage, being compliant with legislation and finding new business opportunities, whilst improving their environmental performance. The framework includes an environmental toolkit, which comprises an environmental training programme and a set of environmental tools. This paper describes the Business Sustainability framework for SMEs.
Funder
Publisher
IST Press
Publisher DOI
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Ireland