Environmental sustainability of facilities management: Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) based model for evaluation

Abstract

Purpose Rapid changes in the environment escalate the requirement of environmental sustainability assessment within built environment. The purpose of this paper is to model the environmental sustainability of facilities management (FM) functions in apparel industry in Sri Lanka. Design/methodology/approach A comprehensive literature review was carried out in order to identify the importance of sustainability assessment for FM, sustainable FM functions and their environmental sustainability indicators. Subsequently, a questionnaire survey was carried out to determine a relative weight of the sustainable FM functions and environmental sustainability indicators through the analytical hierarchy process analysis. Findings Energy management was identified as the most significant FM function in terms of environmental sustainability in apparel industry with a relative performance of 49.12 per cent. Subsequently, the functions of water management (29.39 per cent), maintenance management (11.98 per cent) and waste management (9.64 per cent) obtained the second, third and fourth ranks while asset management (7.85 per cent) was the function which had the least performance score. Relative weights for the environmental sustainability indicators were also determined. Research limitations/implications In respect of the apparel industry, the developed model can be utilised for assessing the environmental sustainability of FM in broader term. Originality/value No proper mechanism was found to assess the sustainability of FM in apparel sector since very fewer research studies were focussed on achieving environmental sustainability in different industries. Hence, the assessment of environmental sustainability of FM in apparel industry is an emerging necessity in the present day, which was addressed in this research.