GREEN SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT (GSCM)

Techshore School of Logistics & Supply Chain Management is an initiative of the leading professional & reputed training brand of Techshore Inspection Services, which is having training centres all over Kerala. Techshore, offers courses in Logistics and Supply Chain Management from early 2015 and successful in providing placements for all those candidates in reputed logistics companies with attractive salary packages and perks. 

GREEN SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT (GSCM)

Business activities can pose a significant threat to the environment in terms of carbon monoxide emissions,discarded packaging materials, scrapped toxic materials,traffic congestion and other forms of industrial pollution .Green supply chain management (GSCM) is considered as an environmental innovation. The concept of GSCM is to integrate environmental thinking into supply chain management (SCM). GSCM aims to minimize or eliminate wastages including hazardous chemical, emissions, energy and solid waste along supply chain such as product design,material resourcing and selection, manufacturing process, delivery of final product and end-of-life management of the products.  As such, GSCM plays a vital role in influencing the total environment impact of any firm involved in supply chain activities and thus contributing to sustainability performance enhancement.

GSCM is evolved from SCM. As competition intensified in the 1990s, the increased awareness of green practices has triggered firms to act in an ethically and socially responsible manner in their supply chains . In the beginning of 1995, GSCM has attracted considerable scholarly interest; GSCM

received highest attention in 2010 . With these practices in mind, firms develop environmental management strategies in response to the changes of environmental requirements and their impacts on supply chain operations . A supply chain is a network consists of all parties involved (e.g. supplier, manufacturer, distributor, wholesaler, retailer,customer, etc.), directly or indirectly, in producing and

delivery products or services to ultimate customers – both in upstream and downstream sides through physical distribution, flow of information and finances .

1) Green management perspective

Van Hoek believed a business should face up to environmental issues and create competitive advantages through green initiatives. He used three approaches in green management: reactive, proactive, and value-seeking. Noci initially involved the green perspective in the supplier-selection process and divided corporate green strategies into reactive and proactive types. The former requests that suppliers only defer to regulators, while the latter expects suppliers to assist in green-product development and to align with any environmental requirements from the firm. Newman and Hanna showed four continuous stages of a firm’s environmental awareness: (i) reactive, (ii) receptive, (iii) constructive, and (iv) proactive.

2) Green design

During the design stage, the new product development (NPD) team usually determines the most essential material selection, production procurement's, package design, and energy usage. These all influence the primary costs and profits of the new product and affect its environmental impact in each life-cycle phase .Considerations include design-for-environment (DfE), eco-design, life-cycle design (LCD), or green design ,Some environmentally-friendly firms also design for disassembly, reuse, and recycling (DfDRR), because this “design for” concept not only enables the product and its components to be easily reused, re manufactured, or recycled at the end of its lifetime (EOF), but also helps to easily separate and replace electronic parts with longer life expectancies.

3) Green purchasing

Companies traditionally see the purchasing function as playing a supportive role in achieving business objectives. However, many organizations introducing green programs have observed that green purchasing significantly eliminates waste, and therefore firms can re-evaluate the purchasing function to improve green management performance. In other words, companies do perceive the importance and strategic influences of green purchasing.

4) Green manufacturing

As mentioned previously, green design outcomes affect sequential stages across the entire supply chain, but they rely on green manufacturing techniques and processes. Manufacturing processes consume a lot of energy acquired from burning various natural resources, such as coal, coke and natural gas, and combustion causes air pollution. Electronics technology generates a large amount of waste. Previous green-manufacturing studies mainly discuss enhancing current production processes or techniques to decrease the generation of toxic matter.

5) Green marketing and service

Consumers experience the effect of global warming and climate change, and respond by re-evaluating what they buy. These “green consumers” adjust their living habits and assess the green attributes of a product or service through their purchases. For example, green consumers save electric energy, recycle paper, return bottles or cans, and buy more environmentally-friendly products.

6) Green supply chain management strategy

Past studies have largely discussed and classified green manufacturing strategies or environmental strategies according to attitudes that companies hold toward green management. The simplest strategies are proactive and reactive. After observing the ways that different industries “green” their supply-chain activities and how developing supply-chain relationships influences resources accumulation and varied performance outcomes, Simpon and Samon proposed a broad range of strategies for GSCM. Depending on the degree of resource commitment and the complexity, their approach used risk-based strategy, efficiency-based strategy, innovation-based strategy, and closed-loop strategy.

Conclusion

Sustainability performance are two inextricably related SCM concepts. As noted earlier, majority of studies have indeed reported a significant relationship between these two constructs. However, there are some issues such as involving collaboration with suppliers in designing green products and adopting environmental practices into processes have yet to be researched fully. In view of this matter, environmental collaboration has been proposed as a moderator of the link between GSCM practices and sustainability performance in this paper. The presence of the environmental collaboration is expected to facilitate GSCM practices, which would ease the implementation of GSCM practices.