Abstract

The relentless pursuit of lower production costs causes companies to invest in more efficient production systems so that they can remain economically competitive, while the actions focusing on more sustainable operations from an environmental point of view are usually performed to meet the political government regulating environmental control. However, it is common for companies to focus their efforts to minimize the environmental impacts at an early stage of the product life cycle, neglecting sustainability management in the post-use phase. Given the context, this study seeks to develop sustainability indicators that can be used by the electronics industry to assess the level of practice and performance during production that are related to product recovery after the use phase, in order to better understand how companies are acting to reduce the environmental impacts of their products at the end of their life cycle. Initially, critical success factors related to environmental management of the product’s end-of-life are obtained. Then, some of those critical success factors are prioritized, giving rise to the indicators of sustainability used in the benchmarking method. Benchmarking was performed in electronics Brazilian companies, and the data was obtained by means of a questionnaire and interviews. It is concluded from the results that the proposed indicators are suitable for measuring the levels of practices and performance of the participant companies in environmental management at the end of the product life cycle as the indicators were able to portray faithfully the reality of each company.

Graphic abstract

Practices and performances in the studied Brazilian companies

中文翻译：

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可持续性基准以评估电子产品生命周期结束管理的实践和绩效：对巴西制造公司的研究

摘要

对降低生产成本的不懈追求促使公司投资于更高效的生产系统，以保持经济竞争力，而从环境角度关注更可持续运营的行动通常是为了满足监管环境控制的政治政府。然而，企业通常将精力集中在产品生命周期的早期阶段尽量减少对环境的影响，而忽视使用后阶段的可持续性管理。鉴于这种情况，本研究旨在制定可持续发展指标，电子行业可以使用这些指标来评估生产过程中与使用阶段后产品回收相关的实践水平和性能，为了更好地了解公司如何采取行动减少其产品在其生命周期结束时对环境的影响。最初，获得了与产品报废的环境管理相关的关键成功因素。然后，对其中一些关键成功因素进行优先排序，从而产生基准方法中使用的可持续性指标。在巴西电子公司中进行了基准测试，数据是通过问卷调查和访谈获得的。结果表明，所提出的指标适合衡量参与公司在产品生命周期结束时的环境管理实践水平和绩效，因为这些指标能够忠实地反映每家公司的实际情况。

图形摘要

在所研究的巴西公司中的实践和表现