Since the Rio summit in 1992, the paradigm of corporate environmental responsibility has gradually and consistently extended beyond complying with increasingly stringent environmental regulation and taking up the proactive initiatives of a few world-class companies. Research indicates that the business and financial performance of companies may depend directly on socially and environmentally responsible business practices. Many world-class companies now realize that customers and other stakeholders do not distinguish between a company and its suppliers. As a result, greening the supply chain is an innovative idea which is fast gaining attention in the industry.
Greening the Supply Chain is a compilation of important chapters written by a diverse set of international authors which incorporates a broad variety of perspectives including:
topics on conceptual development and principles of green supply chain management;
empirical studies which provide the reader with practices and concerns of industries throughout the world including Asia, Europe and North America;
quantitative and analytical tools to aid in environmental supply chain design and development, and;
case studies of implementations of green supply chain practices which describe the complexities facing organizations, supply chains and industries and how they address these environmental concerns through technical and managerial measures.
Industry practitioners and policy makers will read Greening the Supply Chain for the insights it provides into a topic of such emergent and growing concern. Undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in this field will also find this comprehensive and international view of environment supply chain management theory and practice a valuable resource.
This book identifies and furthers the state of the art in green logistics and transportation with a supply chain focus. It includes discussions on concerns and linkages across policy, corporate strategy and operations and inter-organizational relationships and practices. Separate sections are assigned to discuss issues related to greening of logistics and transportation functions, including green logistics network, green land transportation and green air and water transportation. Linking research with practice is another important feature of the book as various techniques and research methodologies are utilized to explain and analyze green logistics and transportation concepts and issues. The authors come from throughout the world from a variety of backgrounds (e.g. policy, technical, engineering, and management backgrounds) to provide solutions and insights from their regional and global perspectives to some of the world's most critical green logistics and transportation issues.
This volume is a practical guide that helps the reader build a quick, evidence-based understanding of green-growth strategies and challenges. Its cogent analysis of real-life case studies enables policy makers and company executives identify successful strategies they can adopt, and pitfalls they can avoid, in drafting and implementing green growth policies. The contributors' empirical assessment of these studies identifies the structural conditions required for economic growth to be compatible with environmental sustainability and how the transition to a new economic paradigm should be managed. A crucial addition to the debate now beginning in earnest around the world, this volume attempts to understand how we can nurture a new-born model of sustainable growth and help it evolve to maturity.
A number of arguments are made by an international group of authors in this though provoking book about an understudied and socially important context. A future in which financial wealth transfers across the North-South divide from richer to poorer countries is far from sufficient for the relief of poverty and the pursuit of sustainability. Caution must be taken when growth is achieved through the liquidation of the natural wealth of poorer nations, in order to maintain a global economic status quo. Neither poverty reduction nor sustainability will ultimately be achieved. The financial collapse and social upheaval that might result will make the most recent economic downturn look trivial by comparison. What is more urgently needed instead, as argued in this book, is collaboration for sustainability and innovation in the global South, especially building on models originally developed in the South that are transferable to the North. In pursuit of a sustainable and more equitable future, the book examines such topics as Cross-Border Innovation in South-North Fair Trade Supply Chains; Potential Pollution Prevention Programs in Bangladesh; Digital Literacy and Social Inclusion in the South through Collective Storytelling and Eco-innovation at the `Bottom of the Pyramid'. Many of these stories and have not been told and need greater visibility. The book contributes in a meaningfully to the discussion of how innovation and sustainability science can benefit both sides in South-North innovation collaborations. It provides useful introduction to the topics, as well as valuable critiques and best practices. This back-and-forth flow of ideas and innovation is itself new and promising in the modern pursuit of a fair and sustainable future for all regions of our planet.
Facilitating Sustainable Innovation through Collaboration, takes an unusually international perspective of sustainable innovation with contributions from Australia, Europe, and North America. Prominent policy makers, scientific researchers and practitioners in this field provide various inputs and analyses relating to the development of sustainable innovations. It is expected that policy makers, organizations, individual researchers, students and even communities can further develop and implement concepts and practices by drawing on the variety of projects and theoretical foundations presented in this volume.
