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With the decrease in natural resources and thus raw material resources, increase in pollution of water, air, and soil, and the decrease in the life quality, the development in environmental activities cannot be postponed anymore. For sustainable development in the face of the tangible serious consequences of climate change, all developed and developing countries should work towards the transition to a “green economy” in order to limit the negative impacts on the environment in all sectors (Hang, 2022). Grants for trademarks, patents and innovations and technological innovations should be used to reduce environmental impacts (Hysa et al., 2023). The public-private sector should develop collaborations for innovation and technological development to find new opportunities for green growth in the economy (Khan et al., 2022).
While the consumption of green products is increasing in the world, it should not be forgotten that these products must be obtained with environmentally responsible manufacturing tools and processes. The environmental friendliness of the products is possible not only with the environmental friendliness of the materials used but also with the application of an environmental perspective in all supply chain processes. However, environmentally friendly products are indispensable not only for improving the purchasing tendencies of customers but also for a sustainable world. Accordingly, companies should assess their manufacturing operations by considering their environmental consequences and reorganize these operations within the context of environmentally responsible manufacturing.
Businesses establish and certify an environmental management system in order to demonstrate their environmental awareness. The existence of an environmental management system has positive outcomes in terms of legality, risk reduction, environmental performance documentation, and employee motivation (Fresner, 1998). Although environmental management systems do not fully meet environmentally responsible manufacturing activities, they provide an important infrastructure to organizations. Instead of developing measures to reduce environmental impacts at the end of production processes, environmentally responsible manufacturing aims to minimize waste and emissions with efficient material and energy management within the framework of a preventive perspective (Fresner, 1998). Environmentally responsible manufacturing consists of the following two main titles (Güngör & Gupta, 1999):
- 1.
Understanding the impact on the environment in each of the product lifecycle and life stages.
- 2.
Making better decisions during design and production, thus ensuring the environmental characteristics of the product are kept at the preferred level.
These activities require time and effort. First of all, it is necessary to determine the environmental consequences of products and their production operations, so that studies can be started to reduce these effects. Identification of environmental impacts is a large-scale and cumulative work that needs to be carried out on an enterprise basis, from raw material suppliers to product manufacturers, from enterprises establishing production facilities to enterprises producing production machinery. Obtained data should be stored in common databases, open to the use of affiliated enterprises. Considering the difficulty of the process and negative environmental trends, studies should be started on environmentally responsible manufacturing, both on the basis of enterprises and on a national and global scale, without wasting time.