Shlomo Mark

CleanServs: clean services for a more sustainable world:

Purpose – The paper aims to describe a novel framework for service design to achieve the overall goal of sustainability and to characterize it while exploring the benefit of doing so for both sustainability and service. This novel framework also proposes new opportunities for sustainability-oriented innovation. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a novel approach to design and implement services that will lead to a reduction in the production of goods and will offer alternatives that will reduce whatever production process is involved in its creation, i.e. clean service – CleanServ. Findings – The authors’ findings suggest that a CleanServ is a service that is competitive with, if not superior to, its conventional tangible or intangible counterparts and one that reduces the use of natural resources and cuts or eliminates emissions and wastes. CleanServs can be categorized into five different groups based on their fundamental contribution to sustainability: prevention, reduction, replacement, ...

Sustainability as service

Purpose – The authors aim to describe the mutual perspectives of sustainability and service science and characterize them for the design and development of more sustainable services and to promote an overall shift toward sustainability.Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a novel model for the design of services that fulfill customer demands and that can be continued for long periods of time without having a negative impact on either the natural or the social environment. Sustainability was therefore incorporated into the service supply chain not only as a primary value, but also as a super value that enables the customer to deliver sustainability to the next generation.Findings – The authors findings suggest that a sustainable service should both imbue the core‐value of the service with sustainability and recruit the customer as a supplier of sustainability to future generations. Thus, sustainable service should mimic natural processes, in so doing achieving energy efficiency, using future‐o...

A first-order simulator to control dioxin emissions: NMCRC-ATMOS

Dioxins are highly toxic halogenated organic compounds formed as an unintentional by-product of many industrial processes involving chlorine and combustion. At the Negev Monte Carlo Research Center (NMCRC) and the Green Processes Center at the Shamoon College of Engineering (SCE), Israel, we have developed a code for the first-order estimation of dioxin emissions from waste incinerators and the subsequent atmospheric dispersion. The NMCRC-ATMOS (Atmospheric Evaluator) program will allow public planners and facility operators to estimate and predict the effect of current and potential waste incineration facilities on nearby population centres. This information can also be used by plant operators to decide whether to run the facilities at maximum capacity based on weather conditions. With the NMCRC-ATMOS tool, the user has the ability to easily establish location-based fallout from the average conditions (both facility and atmospheric) surrounding the waste incineration plant. This program currently focuses on dioxin emissions from waste incinerators, but can eventually be expanded to include other emission sources and atmospheric effects, as well as internet connectivity for real-time data acquisition. NMCRC-ATMOS is a Windows® program that has been tested on Windows XP Service Pack 2 with the .NET Framework 2.0 installed.

Sustainability as a Service

Insofar as it propagates intangible value such as information, knowledge, awareness, methods, and tools, among others, sustainability is essentially a service. Yet it is inherently complex and necessarily comprehensive in nature. As such, it should account for and holistically integrate the environmental, social and economic dimensions of life. But it is not enough to merely account for those dimensions as whole entities, but rather, they should be broken down into and examined at various levels and scales, i.e., from individuals to societies, from the short- to the long-term, and from local to global. Such a task is understandably impossible to deliver in a single service, and therefore, sustainability as a service usually involves multiple providers and customers who must take active part in the value co-creation process to produce and deliver the service. Nevertheless, defining sustainability as a service extends the relations between sustainability and service beyond the incorporation of sustainability into services, directing the focus on sustainability itself. In addition, it allows sustainability practice to adopt the methodologies, frameworks, knowledge, methods and tools that were designed and developed to produce and deliver services and to organize the features of sustainability into a well-defined value-chain.

Sustainability and Service

The service sector has undergone explosive growth in recent years, and today it is the largest sector of the economy. One channel through which the goal of sustainability can be achieved, therefore, is through the design of more sustainable services. In general, there are several different routes to imbue services with sustainability, from the rational use of resources to more efficient value co-creation processes to propositions of the same solution in an alternative, sustainable manner. Ecosystem services, which are nature’s services that support and maintain life on earth, can be mimicked by a variety of service types and modes. These include environmental services that specialize in the minimization of environmental damage, green services that promote more efficient resource use and smaller environmental impacts, and eco-efficient services that are marketable systems of products and services capable of fulfilling a user’s demand more sustainably. All service types and modes can be gathered under the umbrella of clean services (CleanServs), i.e., services that are competitive with, if not superior to, their conventional tangible or intangible counterparts and that reduce the use of natural resources and cut or eliminate emissions and wastes while increasing the responsibilities of both provider and customer. Finally, a sustainable service—which imbues the service’s core-value with sustainability but that also requires the customer to become a provider of sustainability to current and future generations via the production and delivery of sustainable super-value—provides a framework for sustainability-based service innovation.

Assessing Sustainable Services

The design, production and delivery of sustainable services as well as the ability to assess and compare different services to identify those that are the most sustainable, requires that the interactions between sustainability and service be somehow ‘engineered’. This goal can be achieved by instituting a sustainability assessment for services based on a set of unified and comparative measures to qualify and quantify the sustainability of services with respect to their core- and super-values and in terms of the service co-creation process. In this chapter, we suggest a methodology, with indicators and indexes, to measure the integration of sustainability in the design of the service supply chain and to assess the sustainability of service. Taken together, the use of such indicators promotes more efficient decision-making regarding service sustainability. In addition, they enable services and processes to be compared from the perspective of their supply-chains, a process that subsequently helps identify the most un-sustainable links in those chains as well as the links that have the greatest impact on the sustainability of the entire service system. Finally, they also allow for the incorporation of complementary and supportive services to increase the sustainability of the service system as a whole.