Sustainable Supply Chain || Green Supply chain

Sustainable Supply Chain Management :

Sustainable Supply Chain management involves integrating environmentally and financially viable practices into the complete supply chain lifecycle, which involves activities starting from product design and development, to material selection, (involves raw material extraction or agricultural production), manufacturing, packaging, transportation, warehousing, distribution, consumption, return and disposal.

Sustainability in a Supply chain includes the following factors :

•  Environmental Stewardship
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Reduction of Carbon footprint
• Financial savings and viability
• Conservation of resources

Obvious reasons like reduction in carbon footprint and reducing energy and resource consumption, there are ample other reasons for the increased focus of organizations on achieving a Sustainable Supply chain :

• Better bottom line
• Driving increased sales and share valuation by green practices and sustainability
• Sustainability is equated with CSR(Corporate Social responsibility) and stewardship with being a good global citizen
• Elimination of waste in a hallmark of Sustainable supply chains.

Green Supply Chain Management:

It is the concept of integrating sustainable environmental processes into traditional supply chain. This includes different processes like product designing, material sourcing and selection, manufacturing and production, operation and end-of-life management.

Green Supply Chain Management aka GSCM involves driving value creation throughout the supply chain organizations to reduce the harmful impacts on environment. The specific goal of GSCM is often to reduce the carbon footprint by curbing CO2 emissions. But, it also gives other benefits like greater efficiency of assets, less waste production, greater innovation, reduction of production costs, reuse of raw materials, increased profitability, perception of added value to the client and so on.

The success of GSCM can be achieved by ensuring a higher degree of collaboration and transparency of sustainable operations in the upstream and downstream partners in Supply chain.

Simple model of GSCM

Manufacturing steps need to be reengineered to ecofriendly and reverse logistics management of the product after its useful life is done. Ecological design is adopted and other steps include sourcing green materials and chemicals, and provide green trainings to employees under ethical leadership. The green practices include green purchasing, green distribution and warehousing, green transportation with usage of biofuels, green manufacturing processes and the products end-of-life management.   

Since last few decades, growing impacts of global warming, climate change, waste and air pollution issues have dragged peoples’ attention to think more ecofriendly and find optimum possible solution towards achieving GSCM.