Eco-efficient Supply Chains for Electrical and Electronic Products

Hundreds of millions of electrical and electronic appliances are manufactured every year. Furthermore, it is expected that this number will not substantially decrease in the near future. These equipments have a significant impact on the environment, and ceteris paribus, such environmental impact increases with the number of appliances manufactured. Consumers, NGOs and Governments have acknowledged the potential threat posed by these electrical and electronic products. They have systematically demanded companies to reduce the environmental impact caused be their products and services. Companies have responded to these pressures and have engaged in a number of environmentally friendly initiatives. This thesis is motivated by the task of reducing the environmental impact caused by the myriad of electrical and electronic products that make our lives more conformable and enjoyable. More specifically, it addresses the challenge of efficiently and effectively mitigating such impacts. We show that companies will need a mixture of strategies to respond to this challenge. Furthermore, we show that these strategies must consider environmental, technical and marketing aspects of the business of electrical and electronic products. These three aspects need to be considered systemically, and the solutions will vary greatly according to the companies, the products they manufacture, and the ways in which their supply chains are organized

The Environmental Gains of Remanufacturing: Evidence from the Computer and Mobile Industry

Remanufacturing has long been perceived as an environmentally-friendly initiative. The question of how remanufacturing moderates the relation between environmental impact and economic returns is still unanswered, however. In this paper, we focus our attention on the electronics industry. In particular, we take a close look at remanufacturing within the mobile and personal computers industries. We analyze whether remanufacturing for such products substantially mitigates the energy used in the life-cycle of these products, or whether as in most electrical equipments, it can only marginally contribute to such reduction. Using both process-based and economic input-output data, we show that remanufacturing significantly reduces total energy consumption. Furthermore, we test the ubiquitous hypothesis that the market of remanufactured products is composed by products that have been downgraded and are therefore sold for prices below the average price of the new equipments. Using data from 9,900 real transactions obtained from eBay, we show that this assumption is true for personal computers, but not for mobiles. More importantly, despite the fact that remanufactured products may suffer downgrading, and that consumers therefore command a high discount for them, the economic output per energy unit used is still higher for remanufactured products. We thus conclude that remanufacturing for these two products is not only environmentally friendly, but also eco-efficient

From Closed-Loop to Sustainable Supply Chains: The WEEE case

The primary objective of closed-loop supply chains (CLSC) is to reap the maximum economic benefit from end-of-use products. Nevertheless, literature within this stream of research advocates that closing the loop helps to mitigate the undesirable footprint of supply chains. In this paper we assess the magnitude of such environmental gains for Electric and Electronic Equipments (EEE), based on a single environmental metric of Cumulative Energy Demand. We detail our analysis for the different phases of the CLSC, i.e. manufacturing, usage, transportation and end-of-life activities. According to our literature review, within the same group of EEE, results greatly vary. Furthermore, based on the environmental hot-spots, we propose extensions of the existing CLSC models to incorporate the CED

Designing and Evaluating Sustainable Logistics Networks

The objective in this paper is to shed light into the design of logistic networks balancing profit and the environment. More specifically we intend to i) determine the main factors influencing environmental performance and costs in logistic networks ii) present a comprehensive framework and mathematical formulation, based on multiobjective programming, integrating all relevant variables in order to explore efficient logistic network configurations iii) present the expected computational results of such formulation and iv) introduce a technique to evaluate the efficiency of existing logistic networks.The European Pulp and Paper Industry will be used to illustrate our findings

A Methodology for Assessing Eco-efficiency in Logistics Networks

Recent literature on sustainable logistics networks points to two important questions: (i) How to spot the preferred solution(s) balancing environmental and business concerns? (ii) How to improve the understanding of the trade-offs between these two dimensions? We posit that a complete exploration of the efficient frontier and trade-offs between profitability and environmental impacts are particularly suitable to answer these two questions. In order to deal with the exponential number of basic efficient points in the frontier, we propose a formulation that performs in exponential time for the number of objective functions only. We illustrate our findings by designing a complex recycling logistics network in Germany

Is remanufacturing effective and eco-efficient?

Remanufacturing has long been perceived as an environmentally-friendly initiative, and it is therefore sup- ported by a number of governments, in particular in Europe. Yet, the assumption that remanufacturing is desirable to society has never been systematically investigated. In this paper, we focus our attention on the electronics industry. In particular, we take a close look at remanufacturing within the personal computer and mobile phone industries. We investigate whether reman- ufacturing substantially reduces the environmental impact (as measured by energy intensity) created in the life cycles of these two products, or whether it only marginally contributes to such reduction. Furthermore, we investigate whether remanufacturing is more eco-efficient than manufacturing for these two products, i.e. whether re-manufacturing can create more welfare per energy consumed than manufacturing. Using both process-based and economic input-output data, we show that remanufacturing significantly reduces the amount of energy used in the life cycle of these products, and that this result is robust with respect to the different levels of remanufacturing these products are subject to, as well as the different energy efficiencies of such products. However, we also find that the effectiveness of remanufacturing is very sensitive to the life span of the second life of the product. Furthermore, we find that remanufacturing is not always more eco-efficient than manufacturing. We show that the period of the life cycle in which the product is returned to recovery, the quality of the prod- uct (high-end vs. low-end), the easiness to remanufacture and the consequent recovery costs mediate such relationship. Furthermore, we test the hypothesis that the market of remanufactured products is composed by products that have been downgraded and are therefore sold for prices below the average price of the new products. We conclude that such assertation is true. More importantly, we find that despite the fact that remanufactured products may suffer downgrading (and that consumers, therefore, command a high discount for them), value added per energy unit used is still higher for remanufactured products. We also discuss the impact of our findings on the European WEEE and WEEE-alike legislations

Efficiency evaluation of a small number of DMUs: an approach based on Li and Reeves's model

This paper deals with the evaluation of Decision Making Units (DMU) when their number is not large enough to allow the use of classic Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models. To do so, we take advantage of the TRIMAP software when used to study the Li and Reeves MultiCriteria DEA (MCDEA) model. We introduce an evaluation measure obtained with the integration of one of the objective functions along the weight space. This measure allows the DMUs joint evaluation. This approach is exemplified with numerical data from some Brazilian electrical companies.<br>Este artigo trata da avaliação de Unidades Produtivas (Decision Making Units - DMUs) quando seu número é inferior ao recomendado na Análise Envoltória de Dados (Data Envelopment Analysis - DEA). Para isso é explorado o uso do software TRIMAP no modelo MCDEA (MultiCriteria DEA) de Li e Reeves. É proposto um índice de avaliação de desempenho baseado nos valores assumidos por uma das funções objetivo do modelo MCDEA. Estes valores, obtidos pelo TRIMAP, são integrados ao longo de todo o espaço dos pesos. O índice obtido permite uma avaliação de conjunto das DMUs avaliadas. O modelo é ilustrado com um exemplo numérico de avaliação de empresas distribuidoras de energia elétrica