Have you ever wondered what the fuss about transportation emissions (and carbon footprints) was all about? Today’s “astronomy picture of the day” puts it into perspective: the airplane flight patterns over the US. Are you still up to catching your next plane…?
Gyöngyi
Categories: Carbon management
Following the hype of carbon management, a new report on transportation emissions (originating from freight movements) also focuses on CO2 emissions in particular. Alan McKinnon already presented some of the findings at LRN, this is now the full report. What is particularly nice about it is a comparison of different methods to calculate transportation emissions. This and other related reports can now be found at the website of the UK Commission for Integrated Transport.
Gyöngyi
Categories: Carbon management
And the back door is…? The supply chain, of course. No, it’s not only about markets and the intention to enter these - companies abide by the laws and regulations of other countries due to their suppliers as well. Charlemagne concluded with a “Brussels rules OK” last week, and when it comes to the topic of carbon emissions, the Economist saw a “change in the weather” at US companies. This is good news for regulators; they are back on the ball regarding corporate responsibility. The question is, what they’ll do with it…
Gyöngyi
Categories: Carbon management · Supply Chain Management
With the first cup of coffee this morning, a quick word count of the proceedings of this year’s LRN conference and Nofoma conference result in following:
Nofoma 2007 proceedings (1172 pages):
Sustainable: 49
Sustainability: 26
LRN 2007 proceedings (765 pages):
Sustainable: 188
Sustainability: 100
Both conferences represent logistics and supply chain management. The immediate difference lies in the Nordic dominance of the Nofoma, and the fact that a great number of participants at the LRN conference work in UK. There is some but not large overlap of participants between these two conferences.
Is the sense of urgency greater in UK than the Nordic countries? Who is talking the walk, and who is walking the talk?
Árni
Categories: Carbon management · Sustainability · environment
Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.
Or something like that. But recently, one of the most interesting news themes is the weather. Floods in China, Pakistan, the UK, heatwaves in Central Europe… UNEP reported how dire weather conditions in Darfur lead to famines, displacements, and conflicts; climate change being a direct cause to the crisis in Darfur. The National Geographic even offers a selection of maps looking at the effects of climate change. So what? What is there to do about it? For once, even the Economist featured an article on disaster relief, and I quote: “Disaster relief is basically a giant logistical operation“. Not that this was new (at least not to humanitarian logisticians), but now the news is spreading.
The ball has been passed on to research. And here it comes; GIS researchers have recently developed a model to predict floods. And I just love Stoffel and Meister’s (2004) assessment of avalaunches and the accessibility of their areas… While not a new idea per se, evaluating the (transportation) accessibility of areas can be assisted by GIS models, and vehicle routing can well use surface models. Only the focus is now shifting to disaster relief and its logistical response (see e.g. ESRI’s selection of GIS cases and best practices). While this may not yet challenge Kmitta’s (1999) criticism that the SCM involvement of GIS applications is still limited, it sets a precedence, and probably a new trend in research (see this CFP). Interestingly, when it comes to disaster relief, GIS enters the field of “mobile SCM“. Now this is a buzzword we haven’t heard much about lately, have we? It’s time to get back to dynamic and real-time routing and modelling, time to embrace m-business also in SCM. And if we also embrace carbon management, we might just be able to do something about the weather.
Gyöngyi
Categories: Carbon management · Humanitarian supply chains · Research & Methodology · Supply Chain Management
Recent plane crashes got the transport infrastructure (or the lack of it - short, wet, inappropriate runways) of some countries and air traffic control (again, the lack of it; try to fly and land a jumbo jet “on sight”) into the news. But it would be unfair to only judge developing countries for their “bad” transport infrastructure. Building new capacity is one issue, maintaining the existing transport infrastructure another. Money spent on maintenance is the nightmare of many developed countries, as it is not glamorous for politicians, and the return on investment is more difficult to judge, especially if wanting to take “lives saved” into account. Back to wet runways, who hasn’t heard of the first snowfall knocking out major airports every single year? And air traffic jams are abundant at most major airports due to a lack of up-to-date runways for “bigger and better” planes. The age of airplanes is in fact another issue under scrutiny. This at a time when airlines try to boost their image and link “new fleet” to a “reduction of carbon emmissions“. Interestingly, in other countries, age limitations for airplanes can also be seen as an entry barrier (i.e. transportation regulation). But which changes should we expect in the EU now that the 7th Framework Programme focuses on security & safety (also in air transportation)?
Gyöngyi
Categories: Carbon management · Socks and sandals · Sustainability
Here is an interesting blog on recycling that also contains some practical information, especially for those who live and work in the UK.
Árni
Categories: Carbon management · Reverse Logistics · Sustainability
Carbon management is getting increasingly competitive; and counting product miles have interesting effects in the supply chain. Let’s just consider buying organic food that has traditionally been considered to be green. Yet, how green is organic food if (a) transported over long distances (e.g. from one continent to the next) and/or (b) shipped per air? In essence, carbon management should have two effects in the long run: (1) increasing local sourcing (and production), and (2) modal shifts. The latter is an old vision of the EC’s white paper on transportation going trendy and promoting rail over air. And the former? Local farmers’ markets seem to be an answer (at least to organic food). But more interestingly, “buy local” brands are now jumping on the train of equalling local with being green for all sorts of product categories. Insofar, global SCM has been the visionary last chapter of many SCM books. Are we now going to revert to “local supply chain management”?
Gyöngyi
Categories: Carbon management · Supply Chain Management · Sustainability
A common way of charging residents for household waste is through a local tax on annual basis. The taxation is commonly based on the size of the actual property (ft. or m2) rather than the number of residents. In some cases, household pay for number of collections pr. month. By this aggregated approach it still remains unclear to what extent the revenue raised by this taxation covers the cost of collecting household waste to disposal.
Pay By Meter: Electricity, Gas, Water
Other serivces bougth by household include water, gas and electricity, all of which have been associated with the idea of sustainable development. The delivery and consumption of these services are measured, and household are expected to pay accordingly. Only companies that have been authorised are allowed to set up meters and inspect them on regular basis.
This is not the case for household waste. At least not yet.
Pay as you throw?
A lack of space for landfill, low rates of recycling and greenhouse gas emissions are few but many issues that inform the current discussion on household waste.
Fitting bins with microchips may be the solution, requiring household to pay as they throw. This is expected to “boost recycling” (see e.g. here on BBC, but this has been discussed for a while, see here and here at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), but has also fueled a debate on privacy concerns.
The question is whether recycling is a sufficient solution.
Finding a path to innovative solutions
Depending on what power consumers have, this may translate into demands for further efficiency in transport, packaging and storing at the up-stream levels of the supply chain. This was issued more than ten years ago by Prof. Marianne Jahre, at BI in Oslo, Norway, in a paper on Household waste collection as a reverse channel published in IJPDLM (1995, Vol. 25, No. 2), who proposed that the process of collection of waste for recycling may learn from concepts and approaches commonly used in forward logistics flow, for example postponement.
It will be interesting to see whether this constrain will result in any innovative solutions, and also what level of the supply chain will react upon this.
Árni
ps. A search for “pay as you throw” on Google resulted in 147.000 hits today.
Categories: Carbon management · Sustainability · environment
