green supply chain

It was an interesting year for the Green Supply Chain in 2010, with the level of interest going sideways at best by many accounts.

This was probably best exemplified by the lack of interest in the December Cancun global climate meeting, with received just a fraction of the media coverage versus the meeting in Copenhagen the previous year. Combined with the fact that no meaningful agreement was reached at Cancun, and it appears the current Kyoto protocol will expire without being extended, and this is not good news for the Green SCM movement, as lack of a regulatory framework means each company is simply free to pursue whatever Green initiatives it chooses to or not.

DHL and The Logistics Institute - Asia Pacific (TLI – Asia Pacific) of the National University of Singapore (NUS) have established the S$3 million Sustainable Supply Chain Centre of Asia-Pacific (SSCCAP). The initiative will be a best practice hub and intellectual property engine designed to drive sustainable supply chain development in the Asia-Pacific region.

Building on DHL’s global GoGreen environmental protection program, its own sustainable supply chain expertise and its global GoGreen customer solutions, the Centre will create practical business tools for the industry to establish benchmarks in areas of sustainable logistics solutions, involving research and education.

-- Logistics Management, 12/1/2009

The recession may have forced companies to put some or all of their "green" initiatives on the backburner. However, with the turnaround coming, our presenters tell us that now is the time to look at just how sustainable your supply chain is and what you can do to lessen its environmental impact.

Phase I of California's Cap and Trade program begins on January 1. 350 California businesses representing approximately 600 facilities will be covered by the program. Those businesses will be mostly electric utilities and large industrial facilities and will need to fully comply by 2013. Distributors of transportation, natural gas and other fuels will need to become compliant in 2015.

What were the top stories in the Green supply chain in 2013? Here is our list, in chronological order.

January: 

California's cap and trade program for carbon emissions, the only one on the US, goes into effect, without it seems many hiccups or controversies. However, the costs relative to fuel don't kick in until 2015. Allowance prices have been falling as the year ended, as state regulators may increase the amount of free allocations they provide to companies in 2014, a practice commonly seen in Europe.

News buzz coming from reviews of the scheduled report from the he United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that claim the report will say impact of carbon emissions has been overstated. IPCC officials and others deny these reports. Truth later turns out to be somewhere in the middle (see below), as the politics of the report are thick.