Sustainable Business Model With Minimum Generation of Waste Using Optimum Resources: An Empirical Research in Sponge Iron Sector in India

Abstract

Environmental management through resource conservation helps in industrial waste management through cleaner production and also is an issue of sustainable business practice. But, there are limited industry-specific studies on sustainable business practices and even the existing studies are focused on few regions of the world. Therefore the first step in formulation of the research problem was to assess the consumption of different raw materials and production of wastes by the sponge iron industry sector. The focus of the study was identification and evaluation of the industrial process to capture the implications of sustainable use of resources which may help the industries to minimise waste generation through optimum use of natural resources. To be more specific, it was considered that the first step in addressing the issue of sustainable development in business practice is making industrial operations more cost effective through efficient use of resources and minimisation of generation of waste through recycling and reuse of waste. Furthermore, the study ranked the surveyed industries according to their resource efficiency using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and evolved sustainable business model for operationalizing the above concept for sponge iron industrial sector. Further a curve fitting application, taking dolochar generation along Y axis and consumption of power along X axis, was carried out to check whether the linear model is the best fit model for prediction of dolochar generated in a process. The findings showed that minimum generation of waste can be explained in a better way using optimum power and iron ore.