Environmental performance assessment of manufacturing sectors

This study addresses to rank the environmental performance of manufacturing sectors using Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE) method which is a widely used multi-criteria decision making method for environmental management. The study focuses on 24 manufacturing sectors and 5 criteria—water usage, environmental expenditure, environmental employment, waste recover and waste density—to rank the environmental performance of the manufacturing sectors. Rankings of the manufacturing sectors are made using PROMETHEE II, which is a developed version of PROMETHEE, with three scenarios (base scenario, environmental scenario, economic scenario) obtained by different weightings of the criteria. In the analysis stage, manufacturing sectors are ranked and then environmental performance of the sectors is compared in terms of four technology levels (low technology, medium–low technology, medium–high technology and high technology) proposed by OECD. According to the results, manufacture of tobacco products is the best performing sector and manufacture of chemicals and chemical products is the worst performing sector in each scenario. Furthermore, high-technology and medium–high-technology sectors have better environmental performance than medium–low-technology and low-technology sectors in each scenario. After that, Geometrical Analysis for Interactive Aid planes were used to understand the weak and strong points of the manufacturing sectors. Better performing sectors are good at water usage, waste recover and waste density criteria, but bad at environmental expenditure and environmental employment criteria. This study closes the gap as the first study on the environmental performance of Turkish manufacturing sectors using a multi-criteria decision making method, and we hope that this study will be beneficial for the researchers in this area.