Industry 4.0 enablers for a cleaner production and circular economy within the context of business ethics: a study in a developing country

Abstract

To achieve sustainability, businesses are adopting Cleaner Production (CP) and Circular Economy (CE) practices for producing better quality products at the lowest cost while decreasing the negative environmental impact of their operations. The implementation of these practices is highly influenced by Industry 4.0 technology’s enablers, particularly within the context of ethical and sustainable business development. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed to assess the importance of Industry 4.0 enablers for implementing CP practices embedded in CE in the context of ethical societies and assess an industry’s readiness. Firstly, the most effective context-related Industry 4.0 enablers are extracted from previous studies and validated through a Fuzzy Delphi method. Secondly, the Interval-Valued Fuzzy Sets (IVFS) based Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method is applied to evaluate the enablers’ weight. Due to existing ambiguities in the enablers, IVFS was applied to model the uncertainty in an interval [0,1]. The final results indicate that the most important enablers are “Technical Capability”, “Security and Safety”, Policy and Regulation”, “System Flexibility”, “Education and Participation” and “Support and Maintenance” respectively. Thirdly, the Fuzzy Evaluation Method (FEM) was followed to evaluate the readiness score of Industry 4.0 enablers for implementing CP practices embedded in CE and evolving ethical principles of corporate social responsibility. This paper contributes to the CP, CE and ethics body of knowledge by proposing a framework for assessing wider dimensions of Industry 4.0 enablers during the implementation of CP and CE practices and providing ethical and sustainable business development.