International Journal of Production Research Vol. 48, No.

24, 15 December 2010, 72897302

A methodology for selecting a green technology portfolio based on synergy

Congbo Lia*, Fei Liua, Xianchun Tanb and Yanbin Dua
a

State Key Lab of Mechanical Transmission, Chongqing University, Chongqing, PR China; b Institute of Policy and Management, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, PR China (Received 15 January 2009; final version received 28 September 2009) Green manufacturing (GM) is a kind of modern manufacturing mode with the full consideration of resources consumption and environmental impact. The publication of EMS ISO14000, OHSAS18000, environmental label system and environmental regulations has also promoted the practice of GM in real production to a large extent. In order to help enterprises to effectively implement GM with limited environmental investment, we present a methodology for selecting a green technology portfolio from the perspective of environmental strategy. The enterprise benefits derived from each portfolio, including economic and environmental benefits, are evaluated by six main objectives: cost, quality, time, service, resource consumption, and environmental impact. In addition, the synergies among the different types of technologies in one green technology portfolio are also taken into account. Lastly, an illustrative example provides some insights into the application of this methodology. Keywords: green manufacturing; environmental benefit; green technology portfolio; synergy

1. Introduction Ever since the industrial revolution, the number of manufactured products has increased dramatically. Manufacturing has created a great amount of wealth and fortune for mankind, but it has also consumed a great amount of resources which are limited on the earth and has resulted in environmental pollution. These are common phenomena in economic development, especially for the emerging economies. For example, in China, the economy was growing at an annual rate of 10.7% in 2006, and has kept an average annual growth of about 10% over the last four years, but the cost of resources and to the environment for this rapid economic development is vast. In 2006, the proportion of Chinese GDP in the world GDP was about 5.5%, but the proportion of energy consumption was about 15% (Ma 2007). Therefore, how to make manufacturing consume fewer resources and minimise the environmental impact is a momentous issue in the 21st century for manufacturing. Consequently, a new manufacturing mode, green manufacturing (GM), was proposed in the early 1990s. GM is a kind of modern manufacturing mode with the full consideration of resource consumption and environmental impact, the goal of which is to minimise the environmental impact and maximise the resource utilisation during the whole product life
*Corresponding author. Email: cqulcb@163.com
ISSN 00207543 print/ISSN 1366588X online 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/00207540903382857 http://www.informaworld.com

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cycle including design, manufacturing, packaging, use, disposal and remanufacturing, and to make enterprises harmonise the economic benefits and environmental benefits (Melnyk and Smith 1996, Liu et al. 2005). The basic idea of GM is to realise reduction and source control of the resource consumption, environmental pollution, and occupational health and safety harm during the product life cycle, and to make it easier to recycle resources. A lot of new concepts which are similar to GM have been proposed in recent years, such as environmentally benign manufacturing (EBM) (Allen et al. 2002, Gutowski et al. 2005), environmentally conscious manufacturing (ECM) (Gungor and Gupta 1999), environmentally responsible manufacturing (ERM) (Curkovic et al. 2000, Curkovic 2003) etc. Also, GM-related issues are widespread including the ones related to product life cycle assessment, green design, green packaging, disassembly, recovery and remanufacturing. How to implement and operate GM in enterprises is a systematic problem and is very important to the GM techniques application. Especially, the publication of EMS ISO14000, OHSAS18000, environmental label system and environmental regulations has promoted the practice of GM in real production to a large extent. Progressive corporations have invested in increasingly ambitious sustainability initiatives. While environmental investments are welcomed by society, managers need to identify the circumstances favouring the generation of both public benefits and corporate profits (Orsato 2006). However, the implementation of GM needs more investment, which is a financial burden for most enterprises, especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) lacking enough money to apply new green technologies and new equipment. Then the problem is how to allocate the limited capital of an enterprise to the implementation of GM, for the maximisation of the economic benefits and environmental benefits. The pattern of environmental investment, also called a manufacturing firms environmental technology portfolio, is proposed as a critical construct that drives both environmental and manufacturing performance outcomes at the plant level (Klassen and Whybark 1999a). In this paper we propose a methodology for selecting a green technology portfolio, the objective of which is to maximise the economic benefits and environmental benefits of an enterprise. In addition, in one green technology portfolio, there is synergy between the different types of technologies. Then besides the direct benefits of the technology, the synergy-based benefits must also be considered, but the synergy is difficult to quantify, so it is formulated by analytic network process (ANP) in this paper. The rest of the paper is organised in the following manner. The next section gives a brief review of the relevant research. Section 3 presents the methodology for selecting a green technology portfolio in detail. Section 4 includes an illustrative example of the methodology and a discussion of its results. The final section will give the conclusions.

2. Literature review 2.1 Relevant literature on selection of environmental technologies Green technologies, also called environmental technologies, are defined as production equipment, methods and procedures, product designs, and product delivery mechanisms that conserve energy and natural resources, minimise environmental load of human activities, and protect the natural environment. They include both hardware, such as pollution control equipment, ecological measurement instrumentation, and cleaner production technologies. They also include operating methods, such as waste management

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practices (materials recycling, waste exchange), and conservation-oriented work arrangements (car pooling, flexitime), used to conserve and enhance the nature (Shrivastava 1995). The classification of environmental technologies is the first step in the process of selecting an environmental technology portfolio as a whole, monitoring changes, and assessing implications for performance. Some researchers supported a more straightforward typology for characterising environmental technologies as belonging to three general categories: pollution prevention (Cairncross 1992, Freeman et al. 1992, Schmidheiny 1992), management systems (Dillon and Fischer 1992), and pollution control (Hart 1995, Russo and Fouts 1997). Similarly, Rusinko (2007) used the classification of production control, production prevention and product stewardship. Shrivastava (1995) proposed to classify environmental technologies into five themes based on their general management orientation: design for disassembly, manufacturing for the environment, total quality environmental management, industrial ecosystems, and technology assessment. Gungor and Gupta (1999) gave a survey of issues in environmentally conscious manufacturing and product recovery, mainly including life cycle assessment, design for environment, environmentally conscious production, material recovery or recycling, product recovery or remanufacturing and other related problems, such as waste management and pollution. This classification is based on the product life cycle and is very useful to the implementation of these environmental technologies, such that it is adopted in this paper. As to the selection of environmental technologies, there are only a few related papers. Such as, Klassen and Whybark (1999b) developed a basic conceptual model of environmental management within operations, and an empirical validation of this model recommended that proactive managers should implement a balanced portfolio including both pollution prevention and pollution control technologies; Vachon (2007) used the data from a survey of the Canadian and United States package printing industry to examine the linkage between green supply chain practices and the selection of environmental technologies. As the literature review shows, there is no method for selection of environmental technologies, and the research question of this paper remains predominantly unanswered, which concerns the selection of environmental technology considering technologies synergy effects.

2.2 Relevant literature on analytical network process (ANP) ANP is a new methodology introduced by Saaty (2001a, b) that extends the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for decision making to cases of dependence and feedback. Whereas, AHP models a decision making framework using a unidirectional hierarchical relationship among decision levels, ANP allows for more complex interrelationships among the decision levels and attributes. Typically, in AHP the top element of the hierarchy is the overall goal for the decision model. The hierarchy decomposes from the general to a more specific attribute until a level of manageable decision criteria is met. ANP does not require this strictly hierarchical structure. It allows for factors to control and be controlled by the varying levels or clusters of attributes. Some same level controlling factors are also at the same level. This interdependency among factors and

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levels of factors is defined as a systems-with-feedback approach. The relative importance or strength of the impacts on a given element is measured on a ratio scale similar to AHP. The ANP approach is capable of handling interdependent relationships among elements by obtaining the composite weights through the development of a supermatrix, where relative importance weights are adjusted by forming a supermatrix from the eigenvectors of these relative importance weights. The weights are then adjusted by determining products of the supermatrix. The supermatrix development requires a series of steps for assessing the model, which are detailed in Section 4. Some examples of ANP applications include environmentally conscious manufacturing, re-engineering, supply chain performance, logistics, quality function deployment, total quality management, project selection decisions, organisations and performance measurement systems (Ashayeri et al. 1998, Meade and Sarkis 1998, Sarkis 1998, 1999, 2003, Lee and Kim 2000, Partovi 2001, Agarwal and Shankar 2002, Partovi and Corredoira 2002, Sarkis and Talluri 2002, Bayazit and Karpak 2007). In this paper, ANP is used to formulate synergy effect of the environmental technologies and is implemented by Super Decisions, a sophisticated and user friendly software of ANP (Saaty 2001a).

3. Methodology 3.1 Problem description The problem of selecting a green technologies portfolio can be described as follows. There are a set of green technologies for an enterprise to implement GM, but for the constraints of cost, human resources, etc., only several of the alternatives, i.e., a green technology portfolio, could be adopted at this stage. It is assumed that the total number of green technologies alternatives is n, and the green technology set is expressed by vector T t1 , t2 , . . . , tn , in which each alternative ti has two states: selected and unselected. So the state of ti can be denoted by 0-1 variable xi as Expression (1) shows, and the set T t1 , t2 , . . . , tn can be denoted by vector X x1 , x2 , . . . , xn :  1, ti is selected xi : 1 0, ti is not selected Then the different values of x1 , x2 , . . . , xn represent different technology portfolio schemes and accordingly the original question is transformed to obtain the optimal scheme X x , x , . . . , x . For example, there are three technology alternatives to be selected 1 2 n and the probable technology portfolio schemes can be denoted by X1 1, 1, 0, X2 0, 1, 1 and X3 1, 0, 1. If the third one is selected, the optimal scheme is X 1, 0, 1.

3.2 Modelling When selecting a green technology portfolio in the set of technology alternatives, the decision maker should consider not only the economic benefits but the environmental benefits, that is, harmonising the economic benefits and environmental benefits, according to the environmental strategy. Because of the synergy between the different types of

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technologies in one green technology portfolio, the total benefits of the portfolio should include the direct benefits of the technologies, and the synergy-based benefits. The total benefits of one green technology portfolio can be expressed as follows: U Where: U: ui : si: xi: the the the 0-1 total benefits of one green technology portfolio; direct benefits of technology ti ; synergy effect coefficient of technology ti ; variable.
n X i1

xi ui 1 si :

In this paper we take the costs of implementing new technology as the constraints, and take the benefits derived from new technology as the objective. The objective is to maximise the total benefits U, and the model is expressed as follows: max U max subject to:
n X i1 n X i1

xi ui 1 si

xi ci

4 5

xi xi 1 0: Where: C: ci : the total investment of green manufacturing implementation; the cost of implementing green technology ti.

3.3 Formulation of ui 3.3.1 Operation objectives of GM The traditional approach of operations management has evaluated an organisations performance based on four main areas: cost, quality, time, and service, and the environmental strategy requires the enterprise to include environmental performance as a new dimension of operations performance (Jimenez and Lorente 2001). So we introduce another two operation objectives of the environmental aspect: resource consumption and environmental impact, and evaluate the enterprise performance by these six objectives. Each objective can be described by several measures (factors), as shown in Figure 1.

3.3.2 Formulation of ui The weighted average method is used to calculate ui, that is, to obtain the score of each measure for each technology and the relevant weights among measures and objectives, and then to combine scores and relevant weights to calculate a weighted average of scores.

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Economic and Environmental Benefits

Time

Quality

Cost

Service

Environmental impact

Resource Consumption

Customer satisfaction

Energy consumption

Manufacturing time

Solid waste

Gas waste

Figure 1. The reference measures of the six operation objectives.

Then the direct benefits of green technology can be expressed as follows: ui Where: ui : aj : bjk: mj: uijk: the the the the the direct benefits of technology ti,P ui 10; 0 6 relevant weight of objective j, j1 aj 1; Pm j relevant weight of measure jk under the objective j, k1 bjk 1; number of measures under objective j; score of measure jk of the green technology ti.
6 P j1

aj

mj P k1

bjk uijk ,

i 1, 2, . . . , n :

Safety

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

Auxiliary material

Poor products rate

Delivery speed

Product cost

Liquid waste

Raw material

Reliability

. . .

The relevant weights among measures and objectives could be obtained by the AHP method, and the score would be assigned according to the strength of preference scale for each measure of each alternative. Because the information is incomplete and imprecise before applying the new technology, the measures are difficult to collect the data and to quantify, but they could be described as linguistic variables that can be used to model the vagueness or fuzziness inherently existing in the human decision making process. For example, to describe the opinion about the performance of safety, decision makers usually use the fuzzy term of very good, good, general, poor or very poor, etc. For the linguistic variables, scoring scales extending from 0 to 10 are used in this paper, where more preferred alternatives score higher on the scale, and less preferred alternatives score lower; 0 represents a real or hypothetical least preferred alternative, and 10 is associated with a real or hypothetical most preferred alternative. The linguistic variables and scoring rules for each measure are shown in Table 1. 3.4 Formulation of synergy effect coefficient si Synergy, according to Websters Dictionary, is the cooperative action of discrete agencies such that the total effect is greater than the sum of the effects taken independently. In a green technology portfolio, the application effect of each technology is usually influenced by other technologies. For example, life cycle assessment can support green product design, so that the overall environmental impact of the product is minimised.

International Journal of Production Research Table 1. Linguistic variables and scoring rules. Measure Manufacturing time Delivery speed Reliability Poor products rate Product cost Customer satisfaction Gas waste Liquid waste Solid waste Safety Energy consumption Raw material Auxiliary material Scoring rules Very quick Very quick Very good Very low Very low Very good Appreciably adverse Appreciably adverse Appreciably adverse Very good Appreciably serious Appreciably serious Appreciably serious 9, 10 Linguistic variables Quick Quick Good Low Low Good Fairly adverse Fairly adverse Fairly adverse Good Fairly serious Fairly serious Fairly serious 7, 8 General General General General General General Moderately adverse Moderately adverse Moderately adverse General Moderately serious Moderately serious Moderately serious 5, 6 Slow Slow Poor High High Poor Quite adverse Quite adverse Quite adverse Poor Quite serious Quite serious Quite serious 3, 4

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Very slow Very slow Very poor Very High Very High Very poor Extremely adverse Extremely adverse Extremely adverse Very poor Extremely serious Extremely serious Extremely serious 0, 1, 2

Design for recycling suggests making better choices for material selection, so that the processes of material separation and material recovery become more efficient (Gungor and Gupta 1999). From this view, there are synergy effects among a green technology portfolio, that is, the total benefits of one green technology portfolio are more than the sum of the benefits of each technology. In this paper, the synergy effects are described by a synergy effect coefficient. The green technologys synergy effect coefficient si represents the technologys relative importance to the ultimate goal, which is the maximisation of economic benefits and environmental benefits, and it is controlled by the ultimate goal, and is influenced by the other technologies in the same portfolio. In this paper, the synergy effect coefficient is formulated by analytical network process (ANP). In the ANP model, we will consider the direct weights of green technologies on the ultimate goal and the interdependencies among these alternatives in one green technology portfolio. It is worth noting that the synergy effect coefficient is the relative weight of the green technology in a certain portfolio. Thus, the values of si are different in different green technology portfolios. The formulation is detailed in Section 4.

3.5 Model solution 3.5.1 Model From the above discussion, the model can be formulated as follows: " # ! mj n 6 X X X xi aj bjk uijk 1 si max U max
i1 j1 k1

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subject to: 8P n > xi ci C > > > i1 > > > > xi xi 1 0 > > > > 6 <P aj 1 > j1 > > > mj >P > > > > > k1 bjk 1 > > : 0 uijk 10

3.5.2 Solution procedure According to the principle of maximising the total benefits U, the solution procedure is detailed in this section. (1) Identify the probable green technology portfolio under the environmental investment budget. (2) Calculate the total benefits of each portfolio separately, which comprises four steps: Step 1: Set the evaluation measures for this portfolio; Step 2: Calculate the direct benefits ui of each technology; Step 3: Calculate the synergy effect coefficient si based on ANP, which can use the software Super Decisions; Step 4: Calculate the total benefits of each portfolio U. (3) The selected green technology portfolio is the one with the maximum total benefits.

4. Illustrative example A machine tool works company in Chongqing city of China wants to implement green technologies and the technology alternatives include life cycle assessment (LCA), green design (GD), dry cutting (DC) and remanufacturing (RM). The investment budget is 150,000 (RMB). The implementation costs of these alternatives are shown in Table 2. The four alternatives (LCA, GD, DC, RM) are denoted by vector X x1 , x2 , . . . , xn , and according to the implementation cost, the probable green technology portfolios can be denoted by X1 1, 1, 1, 0, X2 1, 1, 0, 1, and X3 1, 0, 1, 1. Calculation of the total benefits of the three portfolios is introduced as follows.

Table 2. Implementation costs. Alternative Implementation cost LCA 45 GD 55 DC 50 RM 50

Note: Monetary unit, thousand RMB.

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(1) Scoring of the measures is shown in Table 3, and according to Expression (6), the direct benefits of green technology can be obtained, u1 5.14652, u2 8.14398, u3 6.84665, u4 8.00742. (2) Because the values of si are different in different green technology portfolios, the synergy effect coefficient in three probable portfolios should be calculated separately. The portfolio X2 1, 1, 0, 1 is taken as an example to show the calculation process of s2 , s2 , s2 in detail. 1 2 4 (i) Formulating the problem to an ANP model as shown in Figure 2. (ii) Completing pairwise comparisons of the components on their controlling factors, as shown in Tables 47. (iii) Taking the results relative importance weights (eigenvectors) and placing them in sub-matrices within the supermatrix, as shown in Table 8.

Table 3. Scoring of the measures. Objective Time (T ) Quality (Q) Cost (c) Service (S ) Environmental impact (E ) Resource consumption (R) aj 0.08000 0.10432 0.12348 0.09000 0.38864 Measure Manufacturing time Delivery speed Reliability Poor products rate Product cost Customer satisfaction Gas waste Liquid waste Solid waste Safety Energy consumption Raw material Auxiliary material bjk 0.50000 0.50000 0.50000 0.50000 1.00000 1.00000 0.25000 0.25000 0.25000 0.25000 0.40000 0.40000 0.20000 LCA 5 5 5 5 4 8 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 GD 5 5 8 8 9 8 9 9 9 9 7 8 7 DC 5 5 5 5 6 8 7 9 8 7 7 6 8 RM 8 8 7 7 9 8 8 8 8 7 8 9 8

0.21356

Total Benefits

OBJECTIVE

LCA Factors GD RM

Figure 2. Network hierarchy model.

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C. Li et al. Table 4. Pairwise comparisons matrix for objective of maximising benefit as controlling component. Relative importance weight 0.10473 0.63698 0.25829

Benefit LCA GD RM

LCA 1 5 3

GD 1/5 1 1/3

RM 1/3 3 1

Table 5. Pairwise comparisons matrix for LCA as controlling component. Relative importance weight 0.66667 0.33333

LCA GD RM

GD 1 1/2

RM 2 1

Table 6. Pairwise comparisons matrix for GD as controlling component. Relative importance weight 0.83333 0.16667

GD LCA RM

LCA 1 1/5

RM 5 1

Table 7. Pairwise comparisons matrix for RM as controlling component. Relative importance weight 0.25000 0.75000

RM LCA GD

LCA 1 3

GD 1/3 1

Table 8. Initial supermatrix. Benefits Benefits LCA GD RM 0.00000 0.10473 0.63698 0.25829 GD 0.00000 0.83333 0.00000 0.16667 LCA 0.00000 0.00000 0.66667 0.33333 RM 0.00000 0.25000 0.75000 0.00000

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(iv) Adjusting the supermatrix so that it is column stochastic and raising the supermatrix to a sufficiently large power until the weights have converged and remain stable, as shown in Table 9. Then s2 0.39130, s2 0.40994, and 1 2 s2 0.19876. 4 (3) According to Expression (2), U2 u1 1 s2 u2 1 s2 u4 1 s2 28:24186. 1 2 4 Similarly, U1 26:17862, U3 24:58794. Because U2 4U1 4U3 , U2 is selected, that is, the portfolio of LCA, GD and RM is selected.

4.1 Discussion (1) The selection and valuation of factors could affect the result of the total benefits and furthermore result in a different selection of technology portfolio. In the above methodology and illustrative example, only a few factors are put forth to evaluate the benefits, in fact there may be many more factors. However, if more factors are added, the complexity of the model with these additional factors will increase. (2) By using ANP, more realistic weights for the synergy effect coefficient can be identified. The comparison of synergy effect coefficient from AHP and ANP is shown in Table 10. For the portfolio X2 1, 1, 0, 1, through the comparison of the two methods, we can find the rank order of synergy effect coefficient is different, i.e., s2 4 s2 4 s2 in AHP and s2 4 s2 4 s2 in ANP. 2 4 1 2 1 4 We can also give some explanations for this result. In the machine tool works company, green design can reduce the material and energy consumption of the machine tools and remanufacturing of the used machine tools can recycle the waste resources, and both of the technologies can achieve dramatic economic and environmental benefits. Also, life cycle analysis can access and evaluate the environmental, occupational health

Table 9. Converged supermatrix. Benefits Benefits LCA GD RM 0.00000 0.39130 0.40994 0.19876 GD 0.00000 0.39130 0.40994 0.19876 LCA 0.00000 0.39130 0.40994 0.19876 RM 0.00000 0.39130 0.40994 0.19876

Table 10. Comparison of synergy effect coefficient from AHP and ANP. Synergy effect coefficient from AHP s2 of LCA 1 s2 of GD 2 s2 of RM 4 0.10473 0.63698 0.25829 Synergy effect coefficient from ANP 0.39130 0.40994 0.19876

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and resource consequences of a machine tool through all phases of its life, but it cannot bring direct economic and environmental benefits. So in AHP, the value of s2 is 1 smallest, and because the green design of the product can be realised to increase recyclability and disassemblability, the value of s2 is larger than s2 . In ANP, the 2 4 interdependences are taken into account. For example, knowledge gained during LCA can be transferred into the design and remanufacturing process, then the value of s2 in ANP is 1 larger than in AHP.

5. Conclusions Selecting green technology is a strategic decision for an enterprise to implement green manufacturing. For an enterprise manager, there may be several green technology alternatives, which could solve the environmental problems. Thus, a good decision aid model or tool could help the managers to make the appropriate decision. In this paper we have proposed a methodology for selecting a green technology portfolio from an environmental strategic perspective, the objective of which is to maximise the economic benefits and environmental benefits of an enterprise. Firstly, the method of evaluating the economic and environmental performance is studied, including the appropriate performance measures (factors) and metrics. The six main objectives are cost, quality, time, service, resource consumption, and environmental impact, and each objective can be described by several measures. Secondly, the synergy effect coefficient of the green technology in each portfolio is proposed and is formulated based on the more accurate preference elicitation technique ANP, which considers the additional factor dependencies and relationships compared to AHP. Then this methodology can obtain the total benefits of different portfolio alternatives. The results of the methodology provide a rank order of the portfolio alternatives, which can be used to select a portfolio for a green manufacturing implementation project. In the actual application of this methodology, there are still some problems. The first problem is the selection of the factors and the collection of accurate and reliable data, which results in the difficulties of evaluating the measures. The second is the aggregation of the information from different decision makers when there are more than two people involved in the decision making process, which actually is a group decision making issue. These two aspects will be the further research directions.

Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, P.R. China (Project No. CDJZR10110003).

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