Interorganisational — supply chain management

Entries categorized as ‘Carbon management’

The weather

August 1, 2007 · Leave a Comment

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

Air transportation in the news

July 30, 2007 · Leave a Comment

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

A (UK) blog on recycling

July 21, 2007 · Leave a Comment

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

Globalisation in reverse

July 16, 2007 · 1 Comment

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

Pay As You Throw – A Chip In Your Bin?

May 24, 2007 · 1 Comment

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

The number one

May 9, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Everyone, and every nation, wants to be the number one. No matter in what. Even being the “worst polluter” counts.  Now that carbon management has been discussed at the UN’s Security Council and the IPCC had it’s climate change meeting in Bangkok, China was pushed to the centre of attention of being the worst polluter, or the “coming” worst polluter globally. The country’s curve of greenhouse gas emissions (and its costs) follows the general “China curve”, that is an exponential curve over a timeline. As Max von Zedtwitz from Tsinghua University noted today, the running gag in Beijing is that it is healthy to smoke, at least then you breathe through a filter. As to stop smog from blurring the picture in Beijing, CSR Asia’s meeting today focused on public transportation issues - and one of the foci of the group’s next summit is on supply chain management related issues. Other research follows suit, looking at corporate social and environmental responsibility in Chinese supply chains. Maybe instead of a political stalemate, it is through supply chains that a “one planet environmental policy” can emerge – as even stated in the document of the informal meeting of EU environmental ministers in June 2006.

Gyöngyi

Categories: Carbon management · Innovation · Sustainability · environment

The carbon-efficient supply chain

April 10, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Carbon emissions are “hip” – there is even a concert coming up on “live earth“. Not surprisingly, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published their report on the human factor in climate change. Now entire cities take up the issue of reducing carbon emissions – see Sydney’s “climate change blackout” and generally, Australia’s switch of light bulbs. (BTW, about regions, I wonder why the BBC decided to have a month of programmes on climate change that are just and only not to be broadcasted in the US. No wonder the ratification of the Kyoto protocol stops there… and the IPCC had to make some politically motivated last-minute changes to their report. Luckily the Supreme Court begs to differ on their opinion on climate change even from the US government.)

Anyway, a good start on energy consumption. But more than just carbon emissions, we’d also need to take a look at the products we produce and consume… So apart from UNEP’s “vital graphics” on climate change, let’s not forget those on waste, product development etc. Has industry really “done enough” and it’s now “just” up to transportation to save the world?

So, products are dead… long live products! But why do products die? We’ve heard a lot about product life cycles – both the marketing, and the environmental management point of view – technology life cycles etc. Yet, we continue to produce non-durable products of over-durable materials (ie materials that do not naturally decompose).  What was it again about life cycle management and closed-loop supply chains? Low carbon economies need to look at the holistic picture of ecological footprints (individual and national ones) and “product miles“. Research as well as practice might want to follow the advice of the Economist: to look at coping strategies with climate change as well as make an effort to reverse such a change. Luckily, SCM research has discovered the importance of the matter; as a first step, MIT will have a CSCMP seminar on energy-efficient supply chains, and greening the supply chain remains trend #1 in SCM research – also in 2007.

Gyöngyi

Categories: Carbon management · Sustainability