Location:   

Environment and Climate

Environment and climate: key in and around the supply chain

Traditionally, climate care and environmental protection are associated with increased costs. Alternative research streams position themselves on a different conclusion. Green strategies can enhance firms’ competitive advantage by attracting environmentally aware consumers and boosting their public image. Also, development of pollution prevention technologies allow companies to save money, increase the productivity and quality of their manufacturing process and help firms generate technological and organizational innovations that give companies a competitive edge.

What is the risk in the supply chain?

Environment and Climate are transversal issues that affect both business leaders and suppliers. Environment and climate risks can relate to the use of natural resources (input), the process and its waste, the transport and the product itself until final disposal. Consequences are of various types:

• Health and Safety: Maintaining air, water and soil clean decrease levels of health problems, and thus employee absenteeism and turnover.
• Costs: Clean effluent water decreases the costs of treatment before sewage or fines. Energy-efficient production systems save expenses. The cost linked to major pollutions is high: e.g. Trifigura’s fine of 152 million € after wild dumping of chemical wastes in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
• Public Image: Environmental reports or scandals influence consumer’s decisions. A green profile is often source of sympathy.
• Nature and biodiversity: keeping enough quantity and quality of limited natural resources ensures healthy ecosystems, which is vital for the economy and all human beings on the planet.

What can I do to improve Environment & Climate in the supply chain?

Improving your green strategy may come from different actions involving the entire workforce.

• Reduce the environmental burden by a green procurement policy: Chose greener suppliers, try to purchase products and materials based on environmental criteria, with less or no use of hazardous materials.
• Try a more eco-designed approach of products by thinking a product in a life cycle approach: Consider green and light packaging, use less natural resources, adapt your marketing, minimise energy consumption, use recycled materials, design a service instead of a product, increase product lifetime,..
• Minimize transport distance to save money on fuels and decrease risks of accidents. Prefer a regional production, locate markets close to a production site, transport processed goods.
• Implement an environmental management system (like ISO14001, EMAS, WRAP) to ensure the safe handling, movement, storage, recycling, reuse, or management of waste, air emissions and wastewater discharges.
• Compile a list of toxic and hazardous products in order to exactly know how to use them, how to protect your employees and how to dispose of them.
• Train employees on the topic of solid waste, wastewater or emissions with the potential to adversely impact human or environmental health, explain how to appropriately manage, control and treat prior to release into the environment.
• List and monitor your legal environmental obligations: permits, licenses, information registrations and restrictions.
• Define and improve key environmental indicators, like: use of water, energy, source of power (for alternative power supply, e.g. generators), quantity and type of waste, impact of logistics and transportation.

Links: