Green

The Green Supply Chain Defined

As the emphasis has shifted from thoughtless industrialization and consumerism to conserving the Earth’s natural resources thanks to the early warnings of environmental issues such as global warning and so on and so forth, corporates (thanks to fervent activists and government legislation) is warming up to the idea of going green with every manufacturing process and their supply chain that has been a part of their businesses for a long time.

A typical supply chain consists of the following steps such raw material extraction, transportation to manufacturing plant, manufacturing the completed product, transportation to locations where consumer purchases these products, Retail or Consumer use, transportation after consumer/ retail use and product disposal. One can reduce the carbon footprint, if recycling can be inculcated into this loop.

Even most of these steps cannot be changed there are two steps that greatly influence the ‘reducing the carbon footprint’ of a particular product namely concept and design. Interestingly, if product is conceptualized and designed/ redesigned with an emphasis on it being a ‘green’ product, then the following steps in the supply chain just need to be tweaked to fit the green product’s original intent, with the disposal step not posing a problem like the ones we have today.

On the other hand, if a company resorts to recycling components of products they prepare, then one will find this loop to be a closed one where the items to be disposed then are transported to the manufacturing plant along with other raw materials to be reused, rather than having to spend more energy to create the reusable components again. This reduces costs for the company, with obvious financial benefits due to goodwill from the people who use their products.
.