A structural approach to develop measurement instrument for production environmental efforts

This paper endeavours to introduce and validate a measurement instrument for production sustainability efforts across a wide range of business sectors. Although empirical studies have examined sustainability factors and their effects, a consistent set of valid, reliable factors has not been developed and used. The lack of a comprehensive measurement instrument is a barrier to hypothesis testing and meta-analysis on sustainability. With a particular focus on the firms' environmental activities, this research extracts relevant constructs and measured variables from the theoretical and practical literature, and proposes an instrument to measure environmental efforts in general. Then, it employs confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), to test validity and reliability of the proposed instrument. This is performed through a pilot study and a large-scale survey on a sizeable sample of the public sector suppliers in the United Kingdom. The outcomes of this paper establish a set of variables, which can measure environmental efforts, and facilitate the analysis of their effects.