Assessing the sustainability of industrial value chains: A mapping method proposal

Abstract

Establishing sustainability policies and business strategies involvesmapping environmental, economic, and social factors in an inte-grative way. In the academic literature, environmentally extendedinput-output tables have been employed to analyse the relation-ship between economic flows and their impacts on sustainability.These methodologies require advanced mathematical expertiseand do not easily provide a graphical representation to facilitatetheir interpretation. To fill this gap, this paper develops a uniqueapproach using Power Query that integrates economic, environ-mental, and employment data to create value chain maps. It alsoprovides examples of the insights gained by applying the methodto 12 European countries. The resulting 240 industrial value chainmaps represent 94.41% of the industrial emissions in the surveyedcountries. This novel and comprehensive methodology for map-ping and characterising industrial sustainability in European indus-trial value chains (including Scope 3 emissions) provides valuableknowledge for researchers, business representatives, and policy-makers to design effective sustainable strategies