Sustainability

For the first time, it was environmental scientists who paid attention to the concept of sustainability, and this term gradually spread in other management fields and found its place. “Sustainability” is one of the key concepts in economics and business management. In the era of globalization, awareness about sustainability issues among organizations is increasing rapidly, which creates a greater need to implement sustainable measures in supply chains to reduce social, economic and environmental problems.

Sustainability is defined by the World Environment Commission as a development that meets the needs of the current generation with awareness of the scarcity of natural resources. Over time, the relative importance of social, economic and environmental dimensions to sustainability has varied. Managing all aspects of sustainability in an organization has become a challenging issue due to the need to completely restructure it with a focus on adopting the technologies of fourth generation industries, clean production and circular economy actions. To deal with the challenges caused by the paradigm shift towards sustainability, the concept of the fourth generation industry has received much attention around the world and has been increasingly proposed as a new approach to create a sustainable business. Achieving economic benefits, minimizing environmental impacts and increasing the efficiency of resource consumption are the main goals of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR).

Clean production is one of the new concepts that integrates several environmental design strategies and can be considered as a potential factor in the fourth generation industry. Clean production emphasizes the integration of relationships between environment and management. Digitalization of industries plays an important role in business sustainability. Technologies can enable efficient plans in resource allocation and coordination with suppliers in sustainable production by collecting the required information in real time from the intelligent production system. Therefore, industries should increase their efforts to achieve sustainability goals and adopt innovative approaches during action.