Christine Meisner Rosen

Product recovery with some byte: an overview of management challenges and environmental consequences in reverse manufacturing for the computer industry

Abstract Estimates vary about the rate at which end-of-life computer products have been piling up, but the total population of spent computers is likely to reach into the hundreds of millions. To tackle this mounting solid and hazardous waste problem, policy and business entrepreneurs are promoting product recovery as an environmentally preferable alternative to disposal, and product recovery infrastructure and strategy has begun to develop in recent decades. However, despite some real and theoretical developments in the field, current literature lacks an overall description of the recovery process capable of capturing the essence of end-of-life management challenges for complex, rapidly obsolete, high-tech products like computers and electronics. The absence of this broad frame of reference presents a problem for managers trying to integrate environmentally sound choices into planning and management. Using case research from the computer and electronics industry, in this paper we present a generalized overview of product recovery. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: to describe the recovery of computers as a step-by-step process, and to frame an environmental research agenda for recovery management. With an eye toward generalizing the growing and diversifying practices in reverse manufacturing, we use our description from the computer and electronics industry to highlight broad challenges that managers confront at each stage of the process and to identify environmental dimensions of product recovery management decisions that require additional research.

Environmental supply-chain management in the computer industry: A transaction cost economics perspective

Summary Our article uses the theory of transaction cost economics as a conceptual basis for examining the contracting mechanisms by which firms in the computer industry structure programs to encourage their suppliers to improve their environmental management systems and/or the environmental quality of their products. We explore the economic transactions hazards associated with asking suppliers to invest in the specialized technologies required to improve environmental performance of products and management practices and the relational contracting mechanisms computer industry firms are using to protect themselves against these hazards. We also describe the importance the managers we interviewed attributed to various transactions hazards and their perceptions of how well their firms were coping with them. We conclude by discussing questions for future research. By using TCE to frame our analysis of how computer manufacturers are structuring their relationships with their suppliers in the environmental area, we hope to show how social science theory can be used to enrich and increase the practicality of the work done by engineers and others in the mainstream areas of the industrial ecology field.

The Role of Voluntary Industry Standards in Environmental Supply-Chain Management.: An Institutional Economics Perspective

Summary Our article uses a new institutional economics (NIE) framework to explore the role of voluntary industry standards in the development and implementation of environmental supplier-management programs in the computer industry. We examine two different voluntary standards, one for the management of design for environment (DfE) in the semiconductor fabrication equipment sector and the other for assessing the implementation and use of environmental management systems throughout the computer industry supply chain. We compare and contrast the two standards to explain why the former was widely adopted and has helped integrate DfE into buyer-supplier relations among adopters, whereas the latter failed to gain acceptance. In line with NIE logic, both standards aimed to lower transaction and customization costs by setting “rules of the game” for interfirm transactions that would help simplify and routinize novel environmental supply-chain programs and activities. Their differential success can be elucidated in terms of how well each met the NIE criteria for remediableness and legitimacy. We conclude that voluntary standards have the potential to play an important role in promoting DfE in industrial supply chains. We further conclude that NIE provides a conceptual framework of great value to industrial ecologists who analyze how industry standards and other institutions help firms move toward more sustainable supply-chain management practices.

The Role of Pollution Regulation and Litigation in the Development of the U.S. Meatpacking Industry, 1865–1880

Business historians have treated the emergence of large, modern, vertically integrated meatpacking firms in the second half of the nineteenth century as the economically rational and inevitable product of the industrys search for ways to maximize profits through technological innovation, vertical integration, and the achievement of economies of scale and scope. This is only part of the story, however. Societys efforts to force the industry to abate its environmental pollution through government regulation and private lawsuits also stimulated and shaped these processes of modernization.

The Role of Business Leaders in Community Sustainability Coalitions: A Historical Perspective

The environmentalist Paul Hawken recently published an article in Orion Magazine in which he lauded the hundreds of thousands of organizations in the USA and countries around the globe that are working to find solutions to an array of increasingly serious environmental, economic, and social justice problems. These groups come from all parts of civil society, including business. As Hawken puts it, they include “research institutes, community development agencies, village- and citizen-based organizations, corporations, networks, faith-based groups, trusts, and foundations.” They are part of broad-based, grassroots movements that are working, often collaboratively, at the local as well as national and international levels, to restructure communities and economies to ameliorate poverty and avert the looming social and economic crises that will result from – or be worsened by – the great environmental problems of our times: climate change, toxic air and water pollution, and the depletion of natural resources.