Concepts such as sustainability and sustainable development applied to companies have recently come under the spotlight pushed by stakeholders that are increasingly aware of the negative ...externalities such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and overexploitation. Several methodologies and tools have been developed encompassing standard, reporting tool, environmental, social, and governance rating tools and frameworks which are often not standardized and increase the uncertainties related to the selection of the most suitable tool or methodology to implement sustainable practices. The purpose of this paper is to design a logical tool, identified as a sustainability decision‐making framework (SDMF), that can guide companies in the process of identifying a personalized, and strategic path toward sustainable development. Specifically, SDMF supports companies in (i) the assessment of material issues and key externalities through bilateral interaction with the key stakeholders, (ii) the adoption and implementation of sustainability through a proactive approach and (iii) reporting their non‐financial externalities. Furthermore, an iterative morphological matrix was developed with the support of 20 sustainability experts and integrated within the SDMF to support the identification of the most suitable methodologies which can be used by companies to mitigate the relevant sustainability issues.
We explore Landrum and Ohsowski (2018)'s development model, which positions each company's sustainability reporting with multiple worldviews of corporate sustainability. We investigate the impact of ...sustainability report communicative actions on corporate sustainability performance. We argue that companies that comply with the reporting guidelines and adopt the business case for corporate sustainability may not capture all sustainability aspects, and therefore may not have a real impact on sustainability performance. Employing a computer-based textual analysis on a sample of UK firms that published sustainability reports during the period 2014–2018, we find that sustainability reports that communicate the message that firms understand sustainability to mean maintaining production and consumption patterns within resources capacity of the planet and coexisting in harmony with nature are likely to have a positive effect on sustainability performance. On the other hand, communicating compliance and the business-centred approach as their understanding of sustainability will negatively affect sustainability performance. Our findings offer important implications for companies who need to change their approach towards sustainability reporting and shift from the business case approach to advance to the next stage of sustainability reporting which should guide corporate decisions and actions.
•Novel measurement of sustainability report narratives.•A first attempt to explore Landrum and Ohsowski's (2018) development model.•We investigate the impact of sustainability reporting on sustainability performance.•Communicating strong and very sustainability has a positive effect.•Communicating weak and very weak sustainability has a negative effect.
PurposeThis paper aims to provide a novel approach to examine sustainability report narratives by considering key features of these narratives including, forward-looking content, risk content, tone ...and sustainability-specific content.Design/methodology/approachUsing a sample of UK firms' sustainability reports from 2014 to 2018, the authors capture the report content by compiling a collection of words using a computational linguistic technique that attempts to identify specific attributes of sustainability reports.FindingsThe findings show the main factors that determine the content of sustainability reports are: (1) external governance-related factors, including the voluntary adoption of sustainability reporting assurance, the choice of assurance provider, stakeholder engagement and ownership concentration; (2) internal governance factors, including board quality and the existence of a sustainability committee; and (3) reporting behaviour including the publication of standardised Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) sustainability reports and financial reporting quality.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors limit our sample to companies operated in the UK. Future research can explore the results in other institutional contexts such as North America or Asia–Pacific where the governance of sustainability reporting and other factors determining the content of sustainability reports could be different. Also, it would be interesting to interview managers and other stakeholders to obtain their opinions with regard to sustainability reporting and assurance practices and to understand their opinions regarding the GRI guidelines and its appropriateness. This study combines different research streams to advance our understanding of sustainability disclosures and factors that determine sustainability narratives.Practical implicationsCorporate managers need to strengthen their internal and external governance mechanisms to enhance the comprehensiveness and credibility of sustainability reports and are encouraged to engage stakeholders in the sustainability reporting process. Policymakers can mandate the assurance of sustainability reports and establish reporting formats and standard words to control the tone of sustainability reports. Finally, researchers, professionals as well as policymakers need to monitor sustainable development goals and targets to increase awareness, knowledge and practices that can be operationalised to ensure a global society that can afford sustainable living.Originality/valueTo the best of our knowledge, no study has yet examined sustainability report narratives by considering key features of these reports, including forward-looking content, risk content, tone and sustainability-specific content.
Surgery represents a major source of carbon emissions, with numerous initiatives promoting more sustainable practices. Healthcare innovation and the development of a digitally capable workforce are ...fundamental in leveraging technologies to tackle challenges, including sustainability in surgery.
A surgical hackathon was organised with three major themes: (1) how to make surgery greener, (2) the future of plastic surgery in 10 years, and (3) improving healthcare outcomes using machine learning. Lectures were given on sustainability and innovation using the problem, innovation, market size, strategy and team (PIMST) framework to support their presentations, as well as technological support to translate ideas into simulations or minimum viable products. Pre- and post-event questionnaires were circulated to participants.
Most attendees were medical students (65%), although doctors and engineers were also present. There was a significant increase in delegates' confidence in approaching innovation in surgery (+20%,
< 0.001). Reducing waste packaging (70%), promoting recyclable material usage (56%) and the social media dimension of public perceptions towards plastic surgery (40%) were reported as the most important issues arising from the hackathon. The top three prizes went to initiatives promoting an artificial intelligence-enhanced operative pathway, instrument sterilisation and an educational platform to teach students research and innovation skills.
Surgical hackathons can result in significant improvements in confidence in approaching innovation, as well as raising awareness of important healthcare challenges. Future innovation events may build on this to continue to empower the future workforce to leverage technologies to tackle healthcare challenges such as sustainability.
In order to enable firms to successfully deal with issues of corporate sustainability, the firms' stakeholders would need to participate in sustainability accounting and management. In practice, ...however, participative sustainability accounting and management are often unfeasible. The resulting consequence is the risk of misbalancing single aspects of sustainability. The purpose of this article is to show that reflexivity in sustainability accounting and management, that is, an ongoing reflection on the relationship between the goals of corporate sustainability and the overarching objective of sustainable development can, at least, mitigate this problem. Reflexivity has the potential to initiate processes of collective learning and could eventually bring about the realization of business models that integrate economic, ecological, and social considerations.
Coal bed gas (CBG) is regarded as an unconventional natural gas resource as a result of its huge reserve; however, most of the currently exploited CBG in China has a low CH4 content mixed with air ...because of technical limitations. The CH4 separation from CBG is significant for energy utilization and greenhouse gas emission reduction. In this work, CH4 was separated from simulated CBG with an absorption–hydration method, which was conducted by forming hydrate slurries in emulsions. Four diesel oil + water + tetrahydrofuran (THF) + sorbitan monolaurate (Span 20) + fatty alcohol polyoxyethylene ether, N = 3 (AEO-3) emulsions (1, 2, 3, and 4) with different average diameters of water droplets (765.85, 1312.16, 2394.06, and 3484.48 nm) were prepared by changing the mass ratio of Span 20 to AEO-3. To simulate a multi-stage separation process, four kinds of (CH4 + N2 + O2) ternary gas mixtures (M1–M4) with different CH4 mole fractions were prepared. The hydrate equilibrium conditions were determined. M3 (30.35 mol % CH4 + 54.88 mol % N2 + 14.77 mol % O2) separation in four emulsions was tested, and the results indicated that the hybrid separation efficiency was significantly improved compared to the single absorption or hydration. Emulsion 1, which has the smallest average diameter of water droplets, showed the best performance. The CH4 concentration in the equilibrium gas phase decreased from 30.35 to 15.93 mol % after one-stage separation, and its recovery reached 63.71% at 274.15 K and 2.424 MPa. The multi-stage separation test was conducted with emulsion 1. It demonstrated that CH4 can be enriched from 8.02 to 91.65 mol % in the slurry phase after a four-stage separation. Then, the effect of the initial gas–liquid ratio and operating temperature was examined. There existed an optimum initial gas–solid ratio, which was beneficial to CH4 recovery. Water droplets in emulsions were first converted into ice particles below freezing, on which hydrate crystal growth had a slow rate and no obvious exothermic phenomenon was observed. This study contributes to a better understanding of CH4 separation from CBG with an absorption–hydration method and also helps in optimizing its process conditions.
The recovery factor of shale oil is extremely low. CO2 flooding is considered a promising way to improve the recovery factor of shale oil. The pressure gradually increases during the actual injection ...of CO2. CO2 and oil can go from immiscible to near-miscible and finally to miscible during the whole displacement process. Therefore, a continuous multipressure point displacement experiment (progressive flooding) with nuclear magnetic resonance technology is conducted. The experimental pressure is increased continuously from 0.7 to 11 MPa, which realizes the immiscible flooding change to near-miscible flooding and finally to miscible flooding, simulating the actual continuous displacement process of a reservoir. The results show that from immiscible flooding to near-miscible flooding and finally to miscible flooding, the cumulative oil recovery factor exhibits a step-like growth trend under continuous multipressure point displacement, and the increase in the amplitude of the recovery rate at different displacement states decreases in turn. In addition, the cumulative recovery factor of differently scaled pores shows different bench-type growth trends. When immiscible flooding changes into near-miscible flooding, the oil in the macropores is completely displaced, and the oil recovery of the mesopores increases more than that of the micropores. When converting from near-miscible flooding to miscible flooding, the increase in the amplitude of oil recovery from the micropores is higher than that from the mesopores. Under the conditions of transitioning from immiscible flooding to miscible flooding, CO2 first forms a miscible state with macroporous oil, second with mesopores, and finally with micropores. The research results provide theoretical guidance and reference for the field practice of CO2 flooding.
Borehole stability is one of the crucial success elements of the drilling operation, which is partially dependent upon the chemistry of the drilling fluid. Nanoparticles are emerging as one of the ...most significant additives for improving the major properties of drilling fluids. Thus, SiO2/KCl/xanthan nanocomposites (NCs) was synthesized from Euphorbia condylocarpa extract in an eco-friendly and environmentally friendly way. The synthesized NCs was used to prepare nanoinhibitive drilling fluids (NIDFs) at different concentrations to improve the rheological, filtration, and inhibition properties of the drilling fluid. All of the required experimental tests related to the rheology, filtration, and swelling measurements were performed at the ambient and high temperature and high pressure (HTHP) conditions. The obtaining results revealed that the rheological properties of the drilling fluids (plastic viscosity, yield point, and gel strength) were improved from 4 cP, 10 lb/100 ft2, and 27 lb/100 ft2 to 19 cP, 17 lb/100 ft2, and 46 lb/100 ft2 (with adding 4000 ppm of KCl) and 19 cP, 62 lb/100 ft2, and 54 lb/100 ft2 (with adding 4000 ppm of synthesized NCs), respectively. In addition, the filtration properties of the base drilling fluid were increased by adding 4000 ppm of KCl at HTHP (fluid loss from 25.85 to 36.38 mL and thickness of the filter cake from 3.4 to 5.1 mm), while the synthesized NCs was more effective in lowering the fluid loss and filter cake thickness from 25.85 mL and 3.5 mm to 2.5 mL and 0.33 mm, respectively. Moreover, NIDFs were favorable in decreasing shale swelling that was 52.2%, but conventional inhibitive drilling fluids could lower shale swelling by 41%. It can be stated that NIDFs are highly applicable toward the successful drilling operation as a result of their abilities in reducing shale swelling, improving rheological properties, and decreasing the filtration properties.
The mining industry has a major impact on society - from an economic, environmental and social perspective and due to a vast number of criteria. Which criteria should be given priority depends on ...where the mining operations take place. This paper’s focus on the Nordic mining industry is partly due to the positive economic trend that the industry is currently experiencing and partly because very little research has been conducted on how the European mining industry addresses sustainability. The purpose of this study is therefore to examine the Nordic mining industry’s sustainability practices and to develop guidelines for such efforts.
The research methods used in the study include a literature review, a content analysis of sustainability reports, a review of existing sustainability initiatives, guidelines and tools, a stakeholder survey and interviews with mining company officials. Based on the findings, sustainability criteria guidelines for the Nordic mining industry are suggested in the areas of corporate governance, fair operating practices, economic aspects, human rights, labour practices, society and the environment. The content of the guidelines is discussed in the light of the sustainability practices performed by the studied mining companies.
•A sustainability criteria guideline for the Nordic mining industry.•The guideline consists of seven core subjects.•Each subject contains sustainability criteria relevant for the Nordic mining industry.•Priority levels A, B and C are given for respective sustainability criteria.
The science of sustainable supply chains O'Rourke, Dara
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
06/2014, Letnik:
344, Številka:
6188
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Recent advances in the science and technology of global supply chain management offer near–real-time demand-response systems for decision-makers across production networks. Technology is helping ...propel "fast fashion" and "lean manufacturing," so that companies are better able to deliver products consumers want most. Yet companies know much less about the environmental and social impacts of their production networks. The failure to measure and manage these impacts can be explained in part by limitations in the science of sustainability measurement, as well as by weaknesses in systems to translate data into information that can be used by decision-makers inside corporations and government agencies. There also remain continued disincentives for firms to measure and pay the full costs of their supply chain impacts. I discuss the current state of monitoring, measuring, and analyzing information related to supply chain sustainability, as well as progress that has been made in translating this information into systems to advance more sustainable practices by corporations and consumers. Better data, decision-support tools, and incentives will be needed to move from simply managing supply chains for costs, compliance, and risk reduction to predicting and preventing unsustainable practices.
PDF
