What is really green supply chain?

Filed in archive Point of view on September 15, 2008

Andrew Kinder of Infor has written a recent article in Industry Week with the title "Designing a Greener Supply Chain" which is a nice summary of what people mean by green operations.

In Andrew's point of view, U.S. manufacturers have not taken the impact of the green movements on their operations seriously. As an example he refers to "Carbon Footprinting" which can be a very complex task taking into account the players in upstream and downstream.

However, the solutions he offers for creating a green supply chain don't seem to me like new ways of doing things: To optimize the physical supply chain, lower energy usage in the manufacturing conversion process and improving product design and packaging to minimize waste have all existed long before the Green operations boom.

This brings out the question that: Is really green supply chain something new? Or companies can simply become greener by doing supply chain management the right way...