Avaliação do nível de sustentabilidade de empresas no setor automotivo brasileiro e italiano

Abstract

The concept of Strong Sustainability states that the ecosystem conservation is the ground for the socioeconomic development. Despite the increase of researches on this subject, the qualitative approach of the studies on Strong Sustainability makes hard the introduction of this topic into the corporate context. The lack of model to assess sustainability in manufacturing that take into account the concept of Strong Sustainability was the research gap found by this study. Thus, the aim of this research was building a model that embodies the Strong Sustainability into the sustainability assessment of manufacturing factories. This investigation employed the survey methodology to get the opinion of experts about the relevance of sustainability metrics. The collected data from experts was the input for calculating the weights of indicators and the share of the economic, environmental and social dimensions in Strong Sustainability. The results pointed out that Strong Sustainability consists in 48% environmental, 29% social and 23% economic. The model application was done by means of multiple cases studies in four factories of the automotive industry, two in Brazil and two in Italy. The results shown that the firms were in regular level of Strong Sustainability. Nevertheless, the sustainability performance of the companies shown different patterns throughout five-year period. The economic growth of Brazilian factories was higher than socio-environmental development. On the other hand, the results of Italian units emphasized distinct priorities. The first case shown the environmental performance was higher than the socioeconomic. Meanwhile, the second case in Italy indicated the best performance to the social dimension.