Paving the way for a green transition through mitigation of green manufacturing challenges: A systematic literature review

The integration of sustainable strategies in manufacturing operations has become mandatory in recent years once sustainable development goals (SDGs) were introduced. Recently, several academicians have explored different strategies under the context of manufacturing including sustainable manufacturing and circular manufacturing. However, manufacturers struggle to shift towards these recent extensions of sustainable/circular manufacturing practices, because most of them are still not able to fully implement green manufacturing (GM). GM acts as a basic platform for these extended manufacturing practices to promote green transition, and manufacturers face several challenges within its implementation. Over the years, several studies explored the challenges and other related factors to promote GM, but manufacturers remain unclear on how to mitigate these challenges. This study considers two metrics of GM, challenges, and critical success factors (CSF), through which a systematic literature review has been made. Based on the review, a CSF theory-based framework has been developed by which GM adoption challenges were mapped with their corresponding mitigating CSFs of GM. To improve understanding among manufacturers, both the challenges and CSFs have been categorized into different dimensions. This is the first study to map the success factors of GM with adoption challenges of GM; this work permits manufacturers to recognize the exact challenges of GM and to understand how they can be mitigated particularly through selected CSFs. In fact, manufacturers will not need to examine other CSFs. In addition to strengthening the academic research of GM, this study seeks to assist practitioners in their journey of green transition with an in-depth explanation of mitigating challenges through CSFs.