Multiple criteria assessment of sustainability programs in the textile industry

Abstract To survive in the long term, business needs to profit, controlling environmental impacts with social responsibility. Sustainability programs involve the integration of social and environmental issues in business models and organizational processes. The assessment of sustainability programs is a problem of multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA). This work presents applications of MCDA for the assessment of sustainability programs in the textile industry. Applied methods for MCDA are analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the technique for the order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). The reasons to apply AHP and TOPSIS include providing an assessment index, ranging from 0 to 1, and that the MCDA model is expected to have more criteria than alternatives. Therefore, an application of other methods, such as data envelopment analysis, could be prejudiced. Concepts from the triple bottom line, economic, social as well as environmental criteria were inserted in the proposed model. Sustainability programs of six leading companies from the Brazilian textile industry were evaluated. The main finding of the research is that AHP and TOPSIS resulted in similar evaluations for sustainability programs. Both methods resulted in the same rank of alternatives. However, with TOPSIS, companies' sustainability indices were more disperse, varying from 0.10 to 0.92 against a range from 0.23 to 0.69 with AHP.