Abstract
The pressures of social and environmental responsibility require companies to consider sustainability issues across the full product life cycle, from the conduct of upstream suppliers to the disposition of obsolete products. Leading companies have adopted a variety of sustainable business practices that reduce their supply chain footprint while generating increased value for stakeholders. Systems thinking and life cycle management are key elements in achieving measurable improvements in sustainability and profitability, and new life cycle assessment methods enable an understanding of supply chain dependencies on ecosystem services. However, incremental supply chain efficiency improvements are insufficient to slow the increases in carbon emissions and other adverse ecological impacts. Both developed and emerging economies will benefit from efforts by progressive multi-national companies to collaborate with governments and non-governmental organizations in order to decouple material flows from economic value creation. Current patterns of industrialization are unsustainable, and innovative breakthroughs will be needed to shift the global economy to a sustainable growth path. In this context, broad corporate adoption of sustainable supply chain management practices is a critical step in achieving a transition to a sustainable global economy.
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Notes
- 1.
The Center for Resilience website, www.resilience.osu.edu, provides information on a variety of ongoing projects and software tools that support enterprise sustainability and resilience.
- 2.
With support from the National Science Foundation, a public version of the Eco-LCA™ tool is available at www.resilience.osu.edu.
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Acknowledgments
This chapter is based on Joseph Fiksel’s keynote presentation at the First International Congress on Sustainability Science and Engineering, August 2009. Portions are adapted from his book Design for Environment: A Guide to Sustainable Product Development, McGraw-Hill, 2009, and from his article, “Evaluating Supply Chain Sustainability,” Chemical Engineering Progress, 106 (5), pp. 28–38, May 2010.
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Fiksel, J. (2013). Meeting the Challenge of Sustainable Supply Chain Management. In: Jawahir, I., Sikdar, S., Huang, Y. (eds) Treatise on Sustainability Science and Engineering. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6229-9_16
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