Examining green production and its role within the competitive strategy of manufacturers

The term Green has broad and emotive cogitations, and this is especially true when applied within the context of manufacturing. Some simply see it as synonymous with more established concepts such as industrial sustainability, while others see closer affiliations with such topics as fair trade and ethical production. This presents particular barriers to those practitioners and researchers who, perhaps being more familiar with traditional production operations disciplines and methods, set out to grasp and apply these concepts within manufacturing businesses. This paper therefore sets out to review current literature from a more conventional production operations perspective, and contributes a set of findings that capture the current state-of-the-art of the topic of green production. In particular, it examines the evolution of green terminology, categorises green production types, and the role that green production can take in the competitive strategy of a manufacturer.