Green manufacturing for environmental sustainability: The hiccups for manufacturing companies in urban Ghana

ABSTRACT Environmental problems have become so profound that they require a concerted effort to fix them, but many manufacturing companies have failed to go green. This paper explores the challenges manufacturing companies (MCs) face in their efforts to have and maintain the best environmental sustainability practices (ESPs) in urban Ghana. The study involved 600 respondents selected from six manufacturing companies using a cross-sectional survey design with a two-stage sampling technique. The result showed that the challenges to environmental sustainability practices negatively relate to the socio-economic performance of manufacturing companies. These findings add to the literature on challenges to achieving environmental sustainability and contribute a social science perspective to the ongoing discussion on ESPs of MCs. This research is unique in the sense that studies on environmental sustainability and MCs have concentrated on the chemicals or pollutants but not on the polluter-behavior dynamics.