Purpose: Sustainable manufacturing practices are one of the significant environmental initiatives taken by manufacturing industries to preserve the environment and improve the quality of human life while performing manufacturing activities. The emergence of the value creation concept, economic value no longer counts as a single factor for measuring manufacturing performance. Within the sustainability context, the impact of manufacturing activities on the environmental and social aspects should be taken into account as the basis for assessing manufacturing performance, which is called sustainability performance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship of sustainable manufacturing practices with sustainability performance, which considers the environmental, economic and social aspects.Design/methodology/approach: A questionnaire survey is carried out among 443 ISO 14001 certified manufacturing companies in Malaysia. Structural equation modelling is used to evaluate the relationship of sustainable manufacturing practices with sustainability performance.Findings: The findings of this study indicate that manufacturing process is the manufacturing stage that gives the most impact on the improvement of sustainability performance. Hence, it is concluded that manufacturing companies in Malaysia are highly focussed on the production bound when implementing sustainable manufacturing practices.Research limitations/implications: Although this study indicates a good estimation of the proposed model, additional variables might be added to improve the prediction strength of the proposed model such as considering type of industries, economic scale or ownership. Adding the comparison of sustainable manufacturing practices between different countries also a valuable research to investigated.Practical implications: The framework proposed here can also assist manufacturing industries to conduct sustainability assessments by providing elements of sustainability performance and can serve as a guideline to select appropriate sustainable manufacturing practices and to what level the practices need to be improved to leverage companies’ sustainability performance.Originality/value: The framework proposed here can also assist manufacturing industries to conduct sustainability assessments by providing elements of sustainability performance and can serve as a guideline to select appropriate sustainable manufacturing practices and to what level the practices need to be improved to leverage companies’ sustainability performance.

Nowadays, the manufacturing industry is faced with the challenge to adhere to stringent environmental regulations due to the scarcity of natural resources, global warming and waste management issues. Increasing environmental concerns and awareness are the driving force which pushes manufacturers all over the world to adopt green manufacturing practices. However, the drivers and barriers of implementing green manufacturing practices in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) differ from those for large enterprises since SMEs lack the data, resources, technical expertise and experience required to implement green initiatives. The environmental performance of SMEs is mostly driven by the intention of company owners. Since SMEs play a crucial role in a nation's economic growth, it is imperative to identify the drivers and barriers which will motivate and hinder the implementation of green manufacturing practices in SMEs, which forms the main motivation of our work. In this paper, we report preliminary findings on the drivers and barriers faced by SMEs in implementing green manufacturing practices, specifically in Malaysia. We use the Delphi survey method to explore, identify and verify the drivers and barriers of green manufacturing practices by obtaining consensus from a panel of experts. The experts are required to answer questionnaires in three rounds. The results of this study will offer insight to SMEs who intend to transform their manufacturing practices from conventional to green ones. We believe that our study will assist the manufacturing industry in prioritizing the key factors which will influence the adoption of green manufacturing practices