Sustainable development is defined as development that meets “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (UNWCED 1987). Meeting the needs of the present depends on the use of our resources, and being able to meet the needs of future generations requires sustaining these resources. Sustainable development is also shown as the “process of achieving human development . . . in an inclusive, connected, equitable, prudent, and secure manner” (Gladwin et al. 1995). Accordingly, a sustainable corporation is one that “contributes to sustainable development by delivering simultaneously economic, social, and environmental benefits” also known as the triple bottom line (TBL) (Hart and Milstein 2003; Elkington 1998). Corporate contribution to sustainable development is known as sustainable value (Figge and Hahn 2004). Although there is universal agreement on the importance of sustainable development, developing methods for applying sustainable development and assessing sustainable value are still a challenge.
Laszlo (2008) states that sustainable value addition must take into account the overall benefits or costs to both the shareholders and other stakeholders (i.e., anyone that can help or hurt a business including producers, consumers, the society, and the environment). Accordingly, sustainable value is generated only when business practices deliver value to shareholders without transferring it away from other stakeholders (Badurdeen et al. 2009). Any other cases resulting in transferring benefits from one group to another, or away from both, are considered unsustainable business practices. Ueda et al. (2009) presented three models for value creation based on the nature of interactions between two major stakeholders (producers and consumers) and the environment, which they also consider as a stakeholder. The three models are class I, providing value model; class II, adaptive value model; and class III, co-creative value model. The class III model shows sustainable value creation based on the premise of the producers interacting with the consumers and the environment (both natural and social) to create sustainable value. Although these two models consider the principles of sustainable development by addressing value creation for all stakeholders and consider the environment, they present a conceptual approach and focus only on products.
The definition of sustainable value must incorporate several different domains. One domain defines who the value is created for. In this context, value must be created for shareholders and other stakeholders. Accordingly, sustainable value is generated only when value is created simultaneously for shareholders and other stakeholders (Laszlo 2008; Badurdeen et al. 2009). Another domain defines what type of value is being created. The type of value created can be in terms economic value, environmental value, and societal value. Sustainable value creation requires increased value in all these categories. The third domain defines where the value is being created. Sustainable value is created at different levels: the product level, the process level, the enterprise level, and the system (or supply chain) level. Another domain can be defined in terms of area of application of sustainable development and can be classified, for example, along different industrial sectors such as agriculture, transportation, construction and building, energy, and manufacturing. This chapter focuses on the application of sustainable development in manufacturing for sustainable value creation.
Manufacturing contributes to 16.5 % of total GDP worldwide and 12.4 % within the USA according to the World Bank data (The World Bank 2013). Aside from being a major value-adding contributor, manufacturing has been the engine for economic growth and has the highest effect on economic growth in the industry. Thus, to promote sustainable development, the value-generating capability through manufacturing should become a major focus. As mentioned previously, sustainable development must not only focus on economic growth, but also consider sustainable value creation (incorporating economic, environmental, and societal values) for all stakeholders. Sustainable manufacturing is defined as “the creation of manufactured products that use processes that minimize negative environmental impacts, conserve energy and natural resources, are safe for employees, communities, and consumers and are economically sound” (U.S. Department of Commerce 2009). Consequently, sustainable manufacturing requires a total product life-cycle approach that considers the four product life-cycle stages (pre-manufacturing, manufacturing, use, and post-use) and the 6R (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover, Redesign, and Remanufacture) (Jawahir et al. 2006) approach to create economic, environmental, and societal values for all stakeholders.
In order to evaluate how effectively sustainable manufacturing creates sustainable value, there is a need for a structured approach for sustainability assessment. According to the domains of sustainable development, quantitative sustainability assessment must incorporate the economic, environmental, and societal aspects of sustainable development. Although economic value assessment methods are well established, there are still challenges in defining and establishing quantitative methods to assess environmental and societal values. In addition, the quantified sustainability assessment must be done at different levels in manufacturing by assessing product sustainability, process sustainability, enterprise sustainability, and system sustainability.
This chapter focuses on developing a sustainability performance evaluation methodology for manufacturing through the introduction of sustainability metrics that quantify and measure sustainable value in a comprehensive manner incorporating all the different factors related to creating sustainable value in sustainable manufacturing activities, as presented in Fig. 1.

Feng et al. (2010) presented a review of prominent metrics and indicators for sustainability assessment in manufacturing. They classified the different methodologies based on the level of technical detail (from low to high) and the application domain (product, process, facility, corporation, sector, country, and world). This work summarized the various methodologies that have been developed by a wide range of entities including corporations (e.g., Ford), international organizations (e.g., OECD), government organizations (e.g., NIST), and standards organizations (e.g., ISO). The categorization of these different methodologies is presented in Fig. 2.

Sustainable value assessment can be done at the product, process, plant, and system levels (Badurdeen et al. 2013). However, there could be difficulties in applying the sustainability assessment methods reviewed by Feng et al. (2010) at these levels.Most methods presented are not comprehensive as they focus on only part of the product’s life-cycle or a limited part of the TBL aspects. To have a comprehensive assessment, the sustainability content for both shareholders and all other stakeholders from the three aspects of the TBL must be considered without any aspect being overlooked or repetitive accounting. Furthermore, sustainability performance evaluation must generate measures to assist decision makers to more effectively assess manufacturing improvement efforts that can increase sustainable value; it must lend itself for integration with other tools and techniques used to improve the manufacturing performance. This is only possible through a quantitative assessment approach that can evaluate sustainable value creation along all the aspects covered in Fig. 1.
To assess the sustainable value creation in manufacturing, one needs to evaluate the sustainability performance of the manufacturing processes and products. Conforming to the definition of sustainable manufacturing from NACFAM (National Council for Advanced Manufacturing) addressing the product and manufacturing process (NACFAM 2012), the target of the research work summarized in this chapter is to develop a set of metrics and a framework through which those metrics can be used to evaluate the sustainability performance of products and manufacturing processes. In the methodology proposed here, a set of comprehensive and quantifiable measurements considering the economic, environmental, and societal aspects of various factors in manufactured products and their manufacturing processes is identified. The total life-cycle behavior of both the product and the intermediate material flows is considered in this comprehensive sustainability evaluation where the 6Rs for closed-loop material flow are also considered. The metrics are quantitative, and the measured data need to go through a process of data collection, normalization, weighting assignment, and aggregation to generate local or global conclusions.
The sustainability evaluation of products and manufacturing processes is the major focus in this chapter. However, such an evaluation can be expanded or aggregated, as needed, as shown in Fig. 3, to assess sustainability performance at narrower levels within the organization (e.g., machine level) or at a much broader level (e.g., enterprise and supply chain levels).

The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. The section “Sustainable Value Creation Through Sustainable Manufacturing” explains how sustainable value is generated through sustainable manufacturing and the key aspects that must be incorporated in evaluating sustainable value. The section “Methodology” presents the methodology to define sustainability metrics that cover economic, environmental, and social values added for products and manufacturing processes. This section also presents the process of normalizing, weighting, and aggregating the measurements for the sustainability metrics to evaluate the overall product sustainability index (ProdSI) and process sustainability index (ProcSI). The section “Case Study” demonstrates the application of the ProdSI/ProcSI methodology using a case study to evaluate the sustainability performance of an automotive component. Concluding remarks are presented in the section “Conclusions.”