Sustainability implies that something continues for a period of time. It also indicates the ability to keep alive. In order to be sustainable, something should be able to continue causing little or no damage for a long time. The debate around sustainable development has arisen from the necessity of finding new mechanisms of continuing growing without compromising future generations not only to meet their own needs but also to continue existing. This work is an attempt to contribute to the development of a new set of indicators that seeks to examine how and whether manufacturing firms are aligning their productive activities towards a more sustainable way. By presenting a pilot survey carried out by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics with cooperation and support of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), it discusses the main features and challenges of designing adequate instruments for measuring sustainable production in order to support a more accurate assessment of human’s capacity to sustain acceptable living standards over time in continuing interaction with other living systems in a dynamic process of co-evolution.