Category Archives: Carbon management

Pay As You Throw – A Chip In Your Bin?

Posted on May 24, 2007 by | 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.

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Posted in Carbon management, environment, Sustainability

The number one

Posted on May 9, 2007 by | 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

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Posted in Carbon management, environment, Innovation, Sustainability

The carbon-efficient supply chain

Posted on April 10, 2007 by | 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

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Posted in Carbon management, Sustainability