Green supply chain
- 2. Introduction In last few decades, depletion of natural resources and its impact on environment have attracted significant attention of government and business communities across the globe Businesses are now realising that adopting green practices in different stages of the SC not only helps to make a greener environment for future generation Also opens multiple avenues for process innovation and improvement Increasing regulatory norms and customers’ awareness, organizations with greener processes would be able to maintain sustainable competitive advantage over their competitors
- 3. GREEN PROCESSES IN SUPPLY CHAIN It is inferred that research on almost every sub-field of green supply chain (SC) has increased in last decade The sub-field of Green SC is as follows Green Design Green Manufacturing Green Logistics Disassembly Remanufacturing
- 4. Green Design Green design or environmentally conscious design is concerned with designing products, which are ecologically sustainable It reduces the adverse environment impact of product by designing a product that requires less energy and emits less emission in manufacturing process and while in use Adopting green design practices can help to improve the greenness of manufacturing process Green design is also considered as the key drivers for innovation, improved brand positioning and improved business communication In early days green design focus on discussing the designing of products that generate less emission both during production phase and customers’ usage when life cycle data became available, the green design objective in literatures shifted from few stages of product life cycle to the complete life cycle of the product
- 5. Green design – Methods and Practices Green design objectives are incorporated in design practices in the following ways: referring design checklist which is developed over time by feedback from downstream supply chain agents referring to standard manual and guidelines such as TS 16949 and ISO 14001 consulting with environmental expert who can be part of design team or who is part of function which approves the design for environment or who can be external to organisation To develop guidelines considering pressure from external agencies Eco-QFD, which is based on the same principle of QFD (Quality Function Deployment) used for capturing voice of customer, adopt life cycle design approach to address the green design requirement design decision methodology which helps the designer in designing a product using product-hierarchy without a tradeoff on the economic issue
- 6. Green design – Methods and Practices Involve users in design process so that their preferences for alternative green product weighed against their environmental aspect can be identified which will yield in sustainable green design The Application of CAD (Computer-Aided Design) to help designing the product with lower assembly and disassembly cost Eco-opti-CAD, a method, which optimizes LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) data for product structure design Traditionally, green design has been limited to achieve green product and green processes, which covers all the activity at the industry level Extending traditional life cycle approach to cradle-to-cradle approach, an eco- effective approach considering the impact of resource consumption
- 7. Green design – Methods and Practices Apart from the scope of green design, it is also important to discuss the environmental issues which are addressed by green design solutions Green design solution helps to address the following issues Reduction in energy consumption (designing product which is human powered) Increment in material reuse ( leader-follower joint optimization to address green design with material efficiency ) Design for reverse logistics to harvest disposable product Reduction in emission
- 8. Challenges to green design Although, green design is important for improving environmental performance of product, its adoption in industry is full of challenges Adoption is affected by external and internal hindrances External hindrances directly relate to economic performance and competitive advantage of product Due to low economic gain achieved through eco-friendly product, top management and middle management provide little support to green design adoption in supply- chain processes Those Organisations, driven towards green design, are driven by regulatory pressures rather than proactive concerns such as economic gain Internal hindrances relate to resource commitment and competency of organisation Companies lacking previous experience in green design practices will face problem in adopting green design Lack of cross functional teams (CFT) approach to solve the problem will also affect the successful adoption of green practices
- 9. Challenges to green design Companies lacking previous experience in green design practices will face problem in adopting green design Lack of cross functional teams (CFT) approach to solve the problem will also affect the successful adoption of green practices Apart from challenges to adoption of green design methods effectiveness of green product development towards environmental performance Green product development and stricter environmental standards might not necessarily benefit the environment
- 10. Green Manufacturing Manufacturing processes involve transformations of product from raw material to finished product These processes generate waste in forms of emission and product residual Green manufacturing aims to reduce such adverse effect of manufacturing processess
- 11. Green manufacturing methods a green manufacturing metric to improve the greenness of individual process, and developed a four-step framework which includes evaluate the current greenness score, prepare improvement plan, implement the plan, sustain the improvement green manufacturing have focused mainly on the selection of green technology and green material for manufacturing, and on production scheduling to achieve green objectives
- 12. Challenges to green manufacturing The key challenges in implementing green manufacturing practices are related to financial challenges, technological challenges, and lack of awareness and unwillingness of organisations There is greater chances that products may meet the end of life green objectives expected by customers even though its production processes may not be green Regulatory pressures are the key driver of the implementation of green processes Small Scale enterprises those are not registered as industrial manufacturer or not approachable for environmental scrutiny may not deploy greener practices in manufacturing processes
- 13. Green Logistics Logistics is the management of the flow of goods from source to destination for the purpose of satisfying the csutomer demand Key logistics processes are material handling, packaging and unwrapping of products, warehousing and transportation Green logistics attempts to minimise the adverse environmental effect of these logistics processes Addresses the environmental problem by optimising the routes, minimising the empty running of containers, reducing the fuel consumption and reducing the emission due to the use of eco-friendly packaging material
- 14. Challenges to green logistics Adopting green logistics is challenging in terms of the cost of investment, technology and knowledge of practices, and customer response to the products Product coming out of the reverse logistics is considered inferior by customers
- 15. Disassembly Disassembly reduces adverse environmental impact by means of product recovery The objective of disassembly is to retrieve parts at the end of product life for reuse, recycle and remanufacturing The product is disassembled into components and subassemblies, which is further disassembled into smaller components These components are then segregated into categories of recyclable, reusable, re- manufacturable and disposable Thus, disassembly minimises the total quantity of waste to landfill It is a critical step to improve organisational environmental performance Disassembly has recently gained increased attention due to its wide utility in product recovery Although included in business processes, disassembly faces high uncertainty in product quality and quantity, and therefore it needs further attention to improve economics of business
- 16. Disassembly Methods Uncertainty of quality and quantity of incoming product causes inefficiency in operation of disassembly process Inefficiencies in disassembly processes have an economic burden on industries These inefficiencies may discourage industries to implement disassembly operations Earlier approach to disassembly was reverse of assembly, but this is an inefficient process Inefficiency in the disassembly process was addressed by planning sequence of disassembly The efficiency of sequence planning is further improved by including learning over repetition of the job disassembly process planning considers the effect of human machine learning over the repetitive use of certain process/method of disassembly
- 17. Disassembly Methods The uncertainty in incoming quality and quantity also affects the disassembly line Initially in disassembly focused on the problems in disassembly associated with a single product, later research considered balancing of multi product line (different products disassembling into similar components) Apart from optimised sequence planning and line balancing, disassembly operational efficiency can be improved by designing products with joints which takes less time and resources to disassemble new joints are more efficient than traditional joints and are more sustainable economically Alternative joints can be reversible joint, thermal and magnetic lock joints These joints can be more efficiently disassembled by applying heating and magnetic field
- 18. Disassembly Methods Environmental and economic performance of the product further can be improved by designing the products that are economically preferable for disassembly and further processing Strategies for optimal disassembly and recovery determining all possible processes of disassembly, determining all possible recovery options available, determining the optimal disassembly and recovery option
- 19. Challenges to disassembly The small electronic components do not have any economic values if they are considered for recycling or remanufacturing and, therefore, adoption of disassembly for small components is not favorable The economic feasibility of disassembly is not favourable unless its efficiency improves These economic challenges make it unfavourable to incorporate disassembly into manufacturing practices
- 20. Remanufacturing Remanufacturing is a process that utilises the used components, coming from disassembly of end of life or used products to manufacture new products The process of remanufacturing incorporates retrieval of end of life product, segregation (sorting) of product, disassembly, cleaning, repairing, and reassembly Remanufacturing is important for improving environment performance of the industry by reducing the amount of materials for land filling It has the capability to reduce the adverse environmental effects by reducing the requirement of new components, production of which causes emissions and energy consumptions Remanufacturing is better if the market is competitive However, the uncertainties in the end of life product’s quality and quantity bring difficulty in managing remanufacturing for optimal economic performance Therefore, it is important to devise methods that help remanufacturing to become an economically attractive practice in the manufacturing industries
- 21. Methods of remanufacturing planning Remanufacturing faces problem with incoming quality, schedule and quantity of end of life or used product and economic feasibility of manufacturing process Once the decision related to remanufacturing of aftermarket product is taken, problem associated with inventory management, production planning, and product design arises
- 22. Challenges to remanufacturing adoption Remanufacturing in developing countries such as India is in the infancy stage Market such as India, lacks strategy for adaptation of remanufacturing in formal business activity There is also a lack of policy from government to guide the remanufacturing implementation They argued that there is confusion with understanding of terms such as reuse, repair, recycle and remanufacture The negative perception of quality of the remanufactured product also places challenges for its adoption in the market
- 23. CONCLUSION Research in green design has been focused on developing methods while little emphasis is provided on adoption of the method Green manufacturing processes can be improved in terms of environmental performance Research in areas such measuring green index of manufacturing processes helps to track the current level of greenness and can promote the improvement of process Also, frameworks for selection of green technology can help organisations to take decisions on adopting green technology
- 24. Reference Niraj Kumar, Ravi P. Agrahari & Debjit Roy, Review of Green Supply Chain Processes 2015.