The Canadian Journey to Sustainability in the Manufacturing Sector in the Context of the Global Stage

Countries encompassing 90% of the dollar value of manufactured products imported to Canada from 1990 to 2022 were investigated to explore Canada's standing in sustainability with respect to consumed goods produced via combustion. The goal was to investigate potential offshoring of manufacturing emissions from Canada to other countries and see whether the development level of the countries played a role. Human Development Index (HDI) data were acquired from the United Nations Development Programme (https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI), imports data were acquired from the Canadian International Merchandise Trade Web Application (https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/b1126a07-fd85-4d56-8395-143aba1747a4/resource/290f3412-e6b7-4811-b738-c360e11d22ef#additional-info), and nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions data were acquired from the EDGAR Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.php/dataset_ap81). NOx emissions can be used as a surrogate for tracking sustainability with respect to carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels. Piecewise linear regressions for each country were run correlating NOx emissions from manufacturing and HDI over the 32-year study period. The number of breakpoints allowed was equivalent to one less than the number of HDI categories spanned by the country over the study period (Low: < 0.550, Medium: 0.550 - 0.699, High: 0.700 - 0.800, Very High: > 0.800). The results showed that as the HDI category of the countries increased, the number of countries with a negative relationship between HDI and NOx emissions increased. This indicates that after a certain level of development, many countries reduce their combustion-related emissions as their HDI increases. The results also indicated that Canada has largely offshored their manufacturing emissions to China, as the consumption of imported manufactured goods consumed per person has increased while the onshore manufacturing emissions per person has decreased.