Environmental impact considerations into supply chain management based on Life-Cycle Assessment

MELE, FERNANDO D.; ESPUÑA, ANTONIO; PUIGJANER, LUIS

Hamilton, Canadá

Conferencia; 53rd Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference; 2003

Canadian Institute of Chemical Engineering

<!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;} @page Section1 {size:841.9pt 595.3pt; mso-page-orientation:landscape; margin:70.9pt 70.9pt 70.9pt 70.9pt; mso-header-margin:35.45pt; mso-footer-margin:35.45pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> The aim of this work is to present a way of evaluating the environmental impact associated to the Supply Chain Management (SCM) decisions by means of a Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) based approach. The LCA is an objective process to evaluate the environmental loads of a product, process or activity by identifying /quantifying energy and materials used and released to the environment, and to evaluate opportunities to do improvements. The assessment includes the entire life cycle of the product: raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, maintenance, recycling and final disposal. On the other hand, SCM is concerned with functional integration of purchasing, manufacturing, transportation, and storing activities. It refers to spatial integration of these activities across geographically dispersed facilities and markets, as well as to temporal integration over strategic, tactical and operational planning horizons. The traditional objective of SCM is to minimize total SC cost to meet a certain demand. However, a company can be concerned with non-monetary objectives, such as environmental aspects. These requirements migrate upwards thorough the SC and create a need for environmental information. LCA appears as a suitable and almost intuitive tool for supporting the decision-maker in a SCM problem. Te presented tool picks up information from the SC database in order to do a LC inventory analysis and to give a set of impact indexes. These indexes together with other criteria will be useful for the manager to make a decision. The operating mode of this tool is illustrated with a case study.