Sustainability Vector: A Graphical Representation Method for Effective Evaluation and Analysis

Abstract

In tandem with the growing concern on sustainable development, green supply chain (GSC) management has received greater attention from both academicians and industry players. Numerous works have been conducted to overcome the operational gaps (i.e., not all decision-makers acquired strong engineering or programming background) which have been a key barrier of the linkage between academic and industry. This work presents a modified graphical illustration method which expressed the economic and environmental performance of a given process in the form of vector (or sustainability vector). With the aid of this sustainability vector, the tendency of the process towards each sustainability dimension is now visualised and thus it can be read and analysed easily and effectively. The conceptual idea of sustainability vector was introduced in the previous work. Then, this paper further enhances the formulation in order to avoid the misleading representation issue of the former method. In this work, the sustainability vector is demonstrated by using a case study which incorporated various types of biomass conversion pathways.