New Technologies for the Environment: Technologies for Quantifying and Linking Environmental and Economic Improvements in Small- and Medium-Size Enterprises

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

This grant provides funding for research on reducing the environmental impact of small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing, specifically, by focusing on the strategic and operational decisions that impact flows of energy and mass through the enterprise. The objective is to develop decision support technologies that will allow SMEs to simultaneously consider costs, energy, and mass impacts of environmentally important strategic and operational decisions. To achieve this objective, first the particular needs, barriers and opportunities for SMEs with respect to self-motivated environmental impact reduction efforts will be identified. Secondly, one or two SME manufacturing plants suitable for a pilot study will be identified. Next, an integrated activity-based cost, energy, and mass model will be developed for the pilot SME. The purpose will be to demonstrate that environmental concerns can be incorporated into both strategic and operational decision making. The infrastructure needed to obtain data from the plant to develop a top-level economic and environmental performance monitoring tool will be identified. If successful, this proposed work would provide SMEs with a new cost-effective technology to identify and tackle their most significant opportunities for improving economic and environmental performance of manufacturing. Benefit of these technologies would be long lasting because it could result in sustained self-motivated environmental performance improvements by SMEs in their manufacturing operations. The very same technologies would quantify the results of improvements, thus providing justification for future rounds of investment technologies to increase economic and environmental efficiency.