Assessing the implementation of Cleaner Production and company sizes: Survey in textile companies

The adoption of Cleaner Production (CP) consists in taking preventive actions of one or more Cleaner Production practices; the most common are the reduction of emissions, efficient use of water, energy, and reuse of waste. This research identified in the literature 31 Cleaner Production practices and, through a survey in multinational textile industries and verified by specialists, was identified and evaluated the level of implementation of each Cleaner Production practices and link them to small, medium and large companies, so, this was the aim of this research. This study used statistical test analysis of variance. The main results were that small companies are motivated to implement Cleaner Production practices solely to reduce costs, and some small companies do not even know the concept of Cleaner Production. Medium-sized companies receive pressures to implement Cleaner Production practices to develop an environmental management system and participate in the competitive exportation market. In addition, ultimately, large companies have levels of implementation of the Cleaner Production practices significantly higher than small- and medium-sized enterprises due to the need to continually invest in their brand to increase market share. Efficient use of water is a Cleaner Production practice adopted by large- and medium-sized companies. These results enable business executives to perform benchmarking using levels of implementation of Cleaner Production practices according to the company size.