Edgar E. Blanco

Conceptual framework for measuring carbon footprint in supply chains

Over the last few years, the fight against climate change has become one of the main topics of international debate. Hence, consumer behaviour has begun to change as they have started to assess the environmental impacts of the products and services they buy. Although various methods exist for measuring environmental (e.g. carbon) impacts, there is no international consensus about the most appropriate one. In addition, calculations can also be affected by limited data availability and uncertainty surrounding the value of key variables. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for measuring and analysing the carbon footprint in supply chains. This research contributes to the knowledge and practice of green supply chain management, at the corporate level, by providing robustness. This aids the decision-making process by identifying strategies in order to reach the efficiency that can be achieved by reducing CO2 emission over the supply network. The framework is validated using real data from a supply chain belonging to the agro-industrial sector. Finally, these results and experience is generalised in order to show the difficulties and challenges in the measuring task.

Disclosing and Reporting Environmental Sustainability of Supply Chains

Environmental disclosure and reporting can be broadly defined as the various methods that businesses use to communicate their environmental impacts, responsibilities, and mitigation activities to stakeholders. The decision of what and when to disclose is specific to each setting; companies make disclosure decisions while considering internal objectives, external pressure, and regulatory requirements. The motivations that drive reporting are often regulatory compliance, risk mitigation, and brand positioning. Reporting companies disclose environmental information in several different ways: by publishing quantitative metrics, by comparing performance with set targets, through third-party verification, and by means of environmental cost accounting. Once a company has assessed its impacts, corporate decision makers can then choose to report solely through their individual reports or to disclose their impacts through a variety of platforms. In reporting, most companies only account for their own operations, not for the entire supply chain. Many critics of standard reporting suggest that assessments scoped at the company level misses far too much and does not account for the supply chain at all. This chapter reviews the current status of business environmental disclosure and reporting for supply chains, ongoing challenges, and concludes with the future of reporting.

Carbon Footprint of Supply Chains: A Scoping Study

This report presents the results of a study to define a standardized approach to measuring the carbon footprint of the transportation component of supply chains, evaluate existing methodologies, and prepare a work plan for a decision tool to measure the carbon footprint. Existing methodologies were reviewed and used to create a standard definition of the carbon footprint of the transportation component of the supply chain. The proposed definition focuses on direct transportation activities, considers the six primary greenhouse gases, and uses a well-to-wheel emissions scope. A list of criteria to evaluate current methodologies were developed based on concepts from accounting, supply chain management, and life cycle assessment. The criteria of breadth, depth, and precision define how relevant a measure is to decision-making, while the criteria of comparability and verifiability assess its suitability for external reporting. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process, the criteria were used to evaluate existing programs and methodologies. Participants in a workshop identified the relative importance of each criterion, and these weightings were used to evaluate the methodologies. The results of this exercise were used to identify strengths and weaknesses of current approaches, and inform the design of the decision tool.

Carbon Efficiency of Humanitarian Supply Chains: Evidence from French Red Cross operations

Sustainability is identified as a major gap in humanitarian logistics research literature. Although humanitarian supply chains are designed for speed and sustainability is of minor concern, environmentally-friendly behavior (e.g. through reduction of transportation emissions and avoidance of non-degradable materials) should be a long-term concern as it may ultimately affect more vulnerable regions. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how greenhouse gas emissions can be measured along the supply chain of common relief items in humanitarian logistics. We analyze the CO2 emissions of selected supply chains using Life Cycle Assessments based on data provided by the French Red Cross. We calculate the CO2 emissions of relief items from ‘cradle to grave’ including production, transportation, warehousing and disposal. Using these calculations, we show that transporting relief items causes the majority of emissions; however, transportation modes may not always be changed as the main purpose of humanitarian supply chains is speed. Nevertheless, strategic and efficient pre-positioning of main items will translate into less transportation and thus reducing the environmental impact. The study also shows that initiatives for “greening” item production and disposal can improve the overall carbon efficiency of humanitarian supply chains.

Streamlined life cycle assessment of carbon footprint of a tourist food menu using probabilistic underspecification methodology

We proposed a methodology based on life cycle assessment streamlining techniques to estimate the carbon footprint (CF) of a meal. The methodology was applied to estimate the meal CF of twenty-four people on a 4-days Galapagos Island tour using over three hundred existing Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) results in the food industry. In spite of the abundance of food LCA studies, there were very little food CF studies on food produced in South America or Ecuador. By combining established and novel life cycle assessment streamlining techniques, we demonstrated how to (a) calculate the uncertainty associated with the use of surrogate CF data, (b) carry out a preliminary carbon footprint calculation using surrogate data to identify a subset of components that contributes the greatest CFs to the product, which we called the set of interest (SOI) and, (c) greatly reduce the uncertainty in the CF results using only exact CFs for the SOI in addition to the surrogate CFs of the other food items. In general, this methodology can systematically cut down the time and resources that are needed to collect all the emission data in the production of food in a meal, but to focus on only a small handful of food items that impact the total CF, provided that the surrogate CF database is large enough to include the true CF.

Using discrete-event simulation for evaluating non-linear supply chain phenomena

We present a simulation model constructed in collaboration with Intel Corporation to measure and gauge the interaction of non-linear supply chain phenomena (such as waste, uncertainty, congestion, bullwhip, and vulnerability). A representative model that mimics part of Intels supply chain from fabrication to delivery is modeled using discrete-event simulation in ARENA. A “phenomena evaluation” framework is proposed to link model inputs and supply chain phenomena in order to evaluate supply chain configurations. Using a sample supply chain decision (safety stock level determination) we follow the “phenomena evaluation” framework to illustrate a final recommendation. Results show that our supply chain phenomena evaluation approach helps better illustrate some trade-offs than an evaluation approach based only on the traditional metrics (cost, service, assets etc.).

A Model that Integrates Direct and Reverse Flows in Omnichannel Logistics Networks

A more complex logistics network has to be managed by retailers that also offer online sales, since new shipping and drop off options are offered to consumers in order to satisfy their expectations. The main goal of this paper is to propose a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model that integrates forward and reverse material flows in a retailer’s omnichannel logistics network. The model proposed helps to determine the mix of orders and returns flows that minimizes costs, and also allows to quantify key trade offs associated to the different options offer in omnichannel models.