Environmental Sustainability Drivers: A Study on Malaysian Palm Oil Industry

Industrial practitioners and policy makers in the Malaysian palm oil industry are now focusing on understanding the factors that influence sustainability of palm oil supply chain network involving the fundamental principle of triple bottom line of social, environmental, and economic performance impacts of supply chain network design. In order to achieve sustainable products, an interpretive structural modelling approach method was used to better understand the drivers related to environmental sustainability reporting in the supply chain network related to the Malaysian palm oil industry. This paper has identified nine (9) environmental sustainability drivers (environmental management, life cycle assessment, green labelling, GHG emissions, climate change, energy efficiency, renewable resources, water, soil and air quality and lastly waste management) and the relationships between them. The findings from the environmental sustainability reporting drivers of this study can be furthered use to explore the potential impacts of supply chain network design on sustainability using the Malaysian palm oil industry as a reference. The novelty of this research is that it identifies the significance of environmental sustainability reporting based on the analyzed drivers and provides evaluation of environmental sustainability criteria’s. This paper has provided a structural model of environmental sustainability and its associated method was developed by using the interpretive structural modeling model to determine the potential drivers in environmental sustainability reporting.