Three dimensional sustainability assessment: A case of combustion motor industry in China

Abstract

Industrial sustainability assessment becomes a new issue along with the depletion of natural resource and environmental degradation. As fundamental tools to quantitative assessment and management of sustainable development, indicator construction and evaluation methods have been a research focus. This paper intends to develop an innovative approach to evaluate corporate sustainability performance. Combined with specific situations of the combustion motor industry in China, a 3D sustainability assessment model is constructed by using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and other multivariate statistics methods. Results of a case study based on 15 companies in the combustion motor industry demonstrated that the presented methodology is theoretically sound and easy to aggregate different indicators along all the three pillars of sustainability.