Ecological design of a production plant Kiss, Tibor; Hetesi, Zsolt; Kiss, Viktor
Ecological economics,
October 2024, 2024-10-00, Volume:
224
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The concepts and solutions of sustainability, resource efficiency, and waste-free production are increasingly influencing our thinking, policy guidelines, and corporate strategies. However, some ...strategies extend beyond conventional sustainable approaches by embracing the fundamental operating principles of ecosystems. In this context, resilience—a natural risk management strategy—is incorporated into the design of a manufacturing company, considering all types of material flows, including solid, liquid, gaseous, and thermal. This ecological approach to resilience is applied to both the operational and financial aspects of the company, via concurrent analysis.
Results indicate that merely achieving zero waste emissions does not ensure sufficient resilience, a core requirement of ecosystems and a fundamental principle of the blue economy. Furthermore, it is found that a production system with a flexible product portfolio can adapt into a more ecologically resilient system, despite technological constraints. The resilience level of the production system in ecological and financial terms is similar. Several types of sensitivity analyses are conducted to deepen the insights into the processes.
•In a production plant, the maximum technical constraint is close to the optimum of ecological resilience.•It is possible to unify the different data types (liquid, gaseous, heat, and solid), according to the requirement of input-output tables.•Physical and financial resilience are close to each other.•Circular economy solutions are not necessarily resilient.
Sustainability is one of the topics that its effects can be seen in all technical and managerial fields of the present era. Achieving sustainability goals requires a comprehensive and long-term ...perspective. Therefor, the present study was conducted with the aim of strategic decision making of sustainable organizational criteria. This study has been applied in Bandar Abbas Zinc Production Company and in terms of method and data collection, time is in the category of survey-cross-sectional studies. The statistical population includes the managers of the Zinc production company who participated in this study by non-probabilistic methods and purposefully by 30 qualified people. The main tool for data collection is an expert questionnaire that its validity was confirmed by university professors. To measure the reliability, the incompatibility rate of all comparisons has been calculated. Fuzzy hierarchical analysis process method was used to analyze the collected data. Findings of data analysis show that environmental factors are the most important. Factors related to costumers, organizational operations, community law, corporate governance, staff and humanitarian activities are the next priority. Therefore, it is concluded that the managers of Bandar Abbas Zinc production Company in line with the company's social responsibility should consider the issue of sustainability in the company's strategic planning. The company will also be able to prevent environmental damage and reduce such sustainable sources.
This study aims to identify the criteria for evaluating the innovativeness of an independent film production company in the European film market. Innovativeness of a company consists of inputs to ...innovation and outputs from innovation. It reveals a company’s potential to implement innovations, which are often sources of competitive advantage. The empirical study involved 29 experts from the European film industry and film production companies. Experts were asked to evaluate 60 criteria in total. The survey results suggest that a company’s innovativeness can currently be evaluated by 51 criteria, of which 15 are the most important. The criteria identified for evaluating a company’s innovativeness are ranked in order of importance for determining a company’s innovativeness. The results obtained allow us to evaluate the innovativeness of a company by comparing independent film production companies with one another in the European film market and thus to determine which company is more innovative. It also makes possible new hypotheses to be raised, analysed and tested. It should be noted that the article was written based on a dissertation in progress.
This article explores the rise in foreign television production company ownership at the beginning of the twenty-first century as a new mechanism of internationalization. It joins mechanisms such as ...foreign program sales and transnational satellite channels in shifting television further from its domestic origins. To date, examination of television’s internationalization has focused on programs and programming. Foreign ownership may be a less obvious “cultural” form of business internationalization, but it nevertheless affects the television culture made available in many places and poses consequences for cultures of consumption. Foreign ownership also opens up new avenues of inquiry for global television scholars to question the shifting geographies of power in the field of television production.
In the last decade, individual awareness of the impacts generated by the activities of businesses has increased more than ever. Consumers, employees and investors have begun to criticize business ...behaviors that negatively affect either society or the environment. Given this context, and relying on the literature relating to hybrid organizations and sustainable business models, our research aims to investigate how dual logic affects the business model of benefit corporations in the Italian film production industry. To capture the complexity of this type of firm, we adopted a qualitative research method, the case study approach. The case selected was ARE FILMS srl, a creative film production company. It has been a benefit corporation since it was founded. The study suggests that the capacity of hybrid businesses to achieve a hybrid mission is intrinsically embedded in their business model. A young film production benefit corporation is more likely to adopt a semi-integrated business model that does not create an external perception of dual corporate identity and does not affect economic sustainability. Moreover, the sustainable value proposition emerges even without the formal application of accepted protocols. Furthermore, we realized that the size of the firm affects business modelling. Finally, this research underlines the fact that benefit corporations do not require external pressure to implement sustainable practices.
The article investigates the problem of task assignment of vehicles for a production company. The presented problem is a complex decision-making issue which has not been analyzed in the literature ...before. Two stages must be passed through in order to solve the task assignment problem of the vehicles for the production company. The first stage is to designate the tasks, the other one is to determine the number of the vehicles that is needed to perform these tasks. The task in the analyzed problem is defined as transporting the cargo from the suppliers to the warehouses and from the warehouses to the production company. The number of the tasks depends on the type of the vehicle which carries out a given task. In order to solve the presented problem, the mathematical model has been developed, i.e., decision variables, constraints, and criterion functions. There are three types of decision variables occurring in the model, which means that this problem is quite complex. The first type of the decision variables determines the volume of the cargo which flows among the facilities on a given working day, the second type of the decision variables determines the use of a given type of the vehicle in the task, and the third type of the decision variables determines the number of the vehicles which perform the task. The criterion functions take the following form: the fuel consumption costs, the transition costs of the cargo via the warehouses, the purchase costs of the cargo, and the task completion time. In order to solve the task assignment problem of the vehicles, a genetic algorithm has been developed. The proposed method of task assignment solution is unique due to the coding method of individuals and related recombination procedures. The construction stages of this algorithm are presented. The algorithm has been verified by the use of the real input data. The developed model and method of its solution are unique in the application to the service of manufacturing enterprises. Due to the high efficiency and multi-aspect approach, it can be applied in enterprises of various industries as support for decision-makers in the optimization of resources.
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