Today environmental regulations and treaties become product-oriented, which means manufacturers should manage their supply chain environmental performance. And market-oriented incentives like environmental labels, subsidy or tax cut enforce them adopting more progressive environmental strategy.
Although the importance of greening supply chain was highlighted, former researches were often based on case studies of specific industry and didn’t provide clear definition of environmental supply chain management which includes fundamental notions for business practitioners.
This thesis presents design for environment, green purchasing, LCA based environmental label, and product recovery & reverse logistics as the components of environmental supply chain management. Case study is made based on these elements.
This study shows that resource-intensive manufacturing firms tend to concentrate their environmental concern on internal improvement which means pollution management and prevention. Since their bargaining power for raw materials purchasing is relatively low, they can’t often afford to buy environmentally friendly raw materials and internal environmental performance improvement could be an effective and efficient way to environmental supply chain management. Technology-intensive assembly industry should cope with EU product based regulations like WEEE and RoHS which enforce them adopting DfE, green purchasing, and so on.
There could be conflict of interests among supply chain players which inevitably comes from pursuing resource efficiency. Especially companies which process raw materials should be advised to proactively consider these in business strategies.
