Developing tools to describe green manufacturing practices

GM is a new and important agenda of the world emerging as solution for sustainability related problems of manufacturing industries. Despite, its urgency to be practiced, the issue is even not has been understood by the world communities and researchers in consistent and similar fashion. Hence, there are even no sufficient reviewed literatures concerning theories related to GM practices and no standardized tool to describe practices. To this effect, this paper has developed tools used for GM description and made simple revision of related literature. Accordingly, the specific objectives of the review were: 1 To develop comprehensive tool that helps to assess GM practices, 2. To review major theories related to GM practices, 3. To identify future research areas concerning GM for developing countries like Ethiopia. To attain these objectives simple review method and contextualization of the concepts to the practical environment of the manufacturing industry, especially of the Ethiopian context were employed. Accordingly, to test the validity of the GM practices assessment tools developed by the reviewer; two experts of the area were consulted to check the authenticity and appropriateness of the content. Whereas its reliability was tested using cronbatch alpha by feeding data collected from one of the cement manufacturing industry in Ethiopia using 63 respondents. Accordingly, major theories relate to GM were reviewed, comprehensive tools used to measure GM practices were developed, and future research areas were recommended. Thus, the following were the advises forwarded for future researchers to: assess GM practices in pollutant manufacturing industries including their policy practices, identify pollutant industries and barriers hindering the GM practices in developing countries, especially identifying the critical ones is very important, and to substantiate why GM is important by identifying the drivers for GM, especially identifying the major ones are highly recommended.