Presents the introductory editorial for this issue of the publication.
Green and sustainable information technology (GSIT) can be an important and strategic decision for many organizations. Strategic GSIT decisions can influen
With China's rapid development, e-wastes issue has become increasingly critical. Without appropriate collection and treatment, e-wastes will bring serious environmental challenges. This paper reviews e-wastes collection in Dalian, China. Our findings show that although the Dalian municipality has made progress in improving the collection rate of e-wastes, several challenges still exist, including unclear responsibilities of stakeholders for e-waste collection in laws and regulations; high collection costs for formal treatment plants; and the lack of appropriate infrastructure, especially collection centers. As part of the research study, we identify several potential solutions for policy makers to overcome these challenges. The initiatives used by Dalian can provide implications for other municipalities in China as well as in other developed and developing countries.
Green supplier development focuses on helping organizations integrate activities to improve the natural environmental performance of their supply chains. These green-supplier-development programs require substantial resources and investments by a buyer company. Investigation into investment management in this context has only begun. This paper introduces a methodology to help manage investment in green-supplier-development and business-supplier-development practices. Managing these practices and their outcomes requires managing of a large sets of data. We propose a combination of rough set theoretic and fuzzy clustering means (FCM) approaches; first to simplify, and then sharpen the focus on the complex environment of evaluation of the investment decisions. The combined methodology, based on performance measures of supplier practices and agreed-upon investment objectives, identifies a set of guidelines that can help make decisions about sound investments in the supplier practices more effectively and judiciously. Various steps involved in the methodology are illustrated through using an example developed to highlight the salient steps and issues of the methodology. We show how the results may be interpreted to obtain many insights useful from both practical and research perspectives. Although the impetus to developing this methodology came from sustainability considerations, the methodology is general enough to be applicable in other areas where management and evaluation of investments is based on large data sets.
Product management activities by marketing, operations, and finance functions have typically focused on the innovation, acquisition, growth, and management of product lines and products. The same is true when considering product management for green products. The latter stages of critical strategic decisions related to product deletion or discontinuation have received less emphasis. In this conceptual paper, the focus is on green product deletion implications for supply chain management. Organizations may view green product deletion as evolving from a deep green to a paler shade of green in their product offerings. A proposed strategic framework pays particular attention to implications of the green product deletion decision for supply chain processes and operational competencies. In this situation, lessened organizational greenness needs to be weighed against other organizational competencies. The strategic and inter-organizational relationships associated with this decision help set the stage for future research on this critical, yet neglected marketing issue.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the existence of differences in the implementation of environmental practices between companies that possess some form of certified environmental management system (ISO 14001 or EMS) and those that do not have any such system. This study also investigates whether companies with a certified EMS are also making additional environmental demands on their suppliers. Design/methodology/approach An empirical study utilizing survey data from automotive supplier organizations was completed. A total of 157 in‐person interviews were conducted with managers of Spanish companies which are automotive supplier organizations. Logistic regressions and non‐parametric tests are used to evaluate hypotheses. Findings A positive relation was found to exist between the possession of certified EMS, specifically ISO 14001 and eco‐management and audit scheme, and the environmental demands that these organizations impose on their suppliers. This finding implies that environmental concern spreads upstream in the supply chain. The environmental demands on suppliers increase with customer organization size, but the degree of internationalization, measured by the rates of imports and exports, does not show a significant relationship to these pressures. Research limitations/implications The study is limited to a single (important) industrial sector and cannot be directly extrapolated to other industries. Originality/value There is a paucity of research that relates the adoption of certified EMS by companies to the adoption and implementation of environmental practices in their own organizations and in supply chain partners. This is the first such study to be completed for the automotive industry.
No abstract is provided for this article.
This paper provides and illustrates a generic framework for deep learning in a Sustainability-based course for higher education instruction. The use of Sustainability Consulting Projects is detailed with potential application to similar programs as part of their Sustainable Education curriculum. Using four disparate institutions of higher learning across the eastern coast of the United States we can complete an exploratory analysis of the framework. This analysis will provide us opportunity to identify and characterize community sustainability projects and their contribution to higher order, integrative and reflective learning. This deep learning framework and model will be helpful to curriculum developers and instructors who wish to introduce these types of projects into their courses and curriculum. These processes and tools may be integrated into current Sustainability Management courses or used as the basis for development of specific courses focused specifically on this topic; e.g., Sustainability Consulting or as a capstone course. Lessons learned and framework design and implementation provide opportunities for further research and development of these courses.
No abstract is provided for this article.
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No abstract is provided for this article.
Sustainable supply chain and carbon management have seen a growing interest in the last decade due to the increasing concerns about global warming and climate change. Policy-makers, researchers and executives have taken various roles in efforts to better measure and control greenhouse gas emissions. This chapter aims to discuss the current state of the art, and key motivations for businesses to decrease emissions, and different policies and regulations that have been designed to incentivize carbon reduction and enhance the environmental awareness of all stakeholders. The chapter also examines the methodologies for measuring and managing carbon emissions of an organization and its supply chain. Further, it discusses carbon management issues related to reverse logistics, life cycle assessment and double-counting of emissions.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework integrating the Hart and Milstein (2003) strategies for organizational sustainable development (SD) with the ideas of Kleindorfer et al. (2005) on sustainable operations management (SOM), which requires guidance of green supply chain management (GSCM). Design/methodology/approach – The construction of the framework was based on previous studies that discussed synergies between operations management principles with environmental bias and studies on adoption of GSCM practices. Findings – The proposed framework guides managers to reconcile operations management practices/principles that are already being implemented in organizations with an environmental perspective because these practices sustain organizations to simultaneously reach SOM and SD. Originality/value – The paper presents a framework that provides guidance on how organizations can seek sustainability in their operations, considering that articles on the topic of sustainability have not been developed with this specific focus.
Rare-earth elements that are crucial for clean-energy technologies are jealously fought over. Policies and programmes to encourage recycling and recovery could reduce tensions.
Environmental regulations are important drivers making organizations take their environmental performance seriously. Environmental regulatory mechanisms include ‘carrots’ or ‘sticks’—they can be incentive or coercive-based. The question exists on which type of mechanism would be most effective in getting organizational attention. The market value of firms can also be affected by these regulatory policies—and provide evidence or further motivation for action. Thus, we empirically investigate stock market reactions to heterogeneous environmental regulatory mechanisms. By using a sample of 301 environmental regulation events published by 193 listed Chinese firms between 2010 and 2020, we find that a significant positive stock market reaction to environmental incentive initiatives exist. We also find a significant negative stock market reaction when environmental penalties from coercive mechanisms exists. We also find there is no significant difference in the value of the market reaction between incentive-based and coercive regulations. Our empirical analysis reveals that monetary reward has greater positive market reaction towards governmental reward and operational disruption penalty has negative market reaction to governmental penalty. However, governmental level—federal versus localized measures—of environmental regulations implementation does not play a moderating role. These findings give important policy and organizational insights as businesses seek meet legitimacy gains from environmental regulatory mechanisms.
