New Technologies for the Environment: Technologies for Quantifying and Linking Environmental and Economic Improvements in Small- and Medium-Size Enterprises

这项拨款为减少制造业中小企业（SMEs）对环境的影响的研究提供资金，特别是通过关注影响企业能源和质量流动的战略和运营决策。目标是开发决策支持技术，使中小企业能够同时考虑成本、能源和对环境重要的战略和业务决策的大规模影响。为实现这一目标，首先将查明中小企业在自我激励的减少环境影响努力方面的特殊需要、障碍和机会。其次，将确定一两个适合试点研究的中小企业制造工厂。接下来，将为试点中小企业开发一个基于作业的成本、能源和质量综合模型。其目的将是证明环境问题可以纳入战略和业务决策。将确定从工厂获取数据以开发顶级经济和环境绩效监测工具所需的基础设施。如果成功，这项提议的工作将为中小企业提供一种新的具有成本效益的技术，以确定和处理改善制造业经济和环境绩效的最重要机会。这些技术的好处将是持久的，因为它可以导致中小企业在其制造业务中持续自我激励的环境绩效改善。同样的技术将量化改进的结果，从而为未来的投资技术提供理由，以提高经济和环境效率。

This grant provides funding for research on reducing the environmental impact of small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing, specifically, by focusing on the strategic and operational decisions that impact flows of energy and mass through the enterprise. The objective is to develop decision support technologies that will allow SMEs to simultaneously consider costs, energy, and mass impacts of environmentally important strategic and operational decisions. To achieve this objective, first the particular needs, barriers and opportunities for SMEs with respect to self-motivated environmental impact reduction efforts will be identified. Secondly, one or two SME manufacturing plants suitable for a pilot study will be identified. Next, an integrated activity-based cost, energy, and mass model will be developed for the pilot SME. The purpose will be to demonstrate that environmental concerns can be incorporated into both strategic and operational decision making. The infrastructure needed to obtain data from the plant to develop a top-level economic and environmental performance monitoring tool will be identified. If successful, this proposed work would provide SMEs with a new cost-effective technology to identify and tackle their most significant opportunities for improving economic and environmental performance of manufacturing. Benefit of these technologies would be long lasting because it could result in sustained self-motivated environmental performance improvements by SMEs in their manufacturing operations. The very same technologies would quantify the results of improvements, thus providing justification for future rounds of investment technologies to increase economic and environmental efficiency.