Benchmarking of sustainability to assess practices and performances of the management of the end of life cycle of electronic products: a study of Brazilian manufacturing companies

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.

Automated summary

Companies invest in efficient production systems to lower costs and remain competitive, while environmental sustainability efforts are often driven by government regulations. However, many companies focus on minimizing environmental impacts in the early stages of product life cycle, neglecting sustainability management post-use. This study developed sustainability indicators for the electronics industry to assess environmental practices related to product recovery after use, revealing how companies are working to reduce environmental impacts at the end of product life cycle.