The increasing pressure of the need of environmentally friendly and resource-friendly industrial processes, has boosted the sustainable manufacturing as a strategic necessity, especially in the emerging economies such as India. The paper presents the multi-dimensional nature of the adoption of sustainability within Indian manufacturing, in particular, small and medium enterprises (SMEs). With the mixed-methods research design, the study combines survey information of more than 100 firms, interviews with experts, the estimation of green technology, organizational enablers, and policy mechanism using simulation modeling with RETScreens and MATLAB, and structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to evaluate the influence of green technologies, organizational enablers, and policy mechanisms. The findings indicate a middle ground of adoption as far as green manufacturing processes like energy systems, waste heat recovery, and closed-loop water reuse are concerned. However, adoption is not equally distributed across the sectors because of the limitation of capital, absence of technical competencies, and fractured laws. Companies that have incorporated the use of Industry 4.0 technologies including the IoT, AI, and blockchain have shown better sustainability results, particularly when coupled with endogenous forces such as the dedication of top management, cross-functional education, and awareness of cultures regarding sharing knowledge. The importance of favorable policies and government incentives is also mentioned in the study but the current mechanisms are usually found to be insufficient to cover the needs of SMEs. Fuzzy set analysis and life cycle analysis (LCA) validate that effective adoption of sustainability is the product of synergistic technologies, organizational capacity and institutional support. The study gives a verified sustainability evaluation tool that can be used by companies to compare performance and strategize on interventions. The findings offer policy-makers, executives in the manufacturing sector, and scientific communities interested in scaling sustainable manufacturing with a view to scaling it in an inclusive and systematic manner.
Jamal Sheikh-Ahmad (Tue,) studied this question.