If there’s one thing I can urge companies to do is to request that their orders be shipped complete, whether it’s from an office supply company or for your new laptop. When you contact them, just ask that the order be shipped together and not as stock becomes available. This option is not usually available when ordering online and is something organizations would rather not do- you may have to call in your order. The reason they detour shipping in this method is that it inflates inventory; the product stays on the shelf longer waiting for its counter parts to arrive. Another quick way is to order from as few companies as possible, further reducing deliveries. This project was to promote shipping complete in an effort to reduce packaging and carbon dioxide from couriers.
To begin this project, I first took a look at how many orders were shipping partial, what the carbon emissions were for those shipments and what was it costing the company to move stock off the shelves faster. [Read more...]
Supply Chain Analysis from a sustainability perspective: This is a report I had done for one of our clients looking at where their suppliers are located, the frequency of deliveries, the CO2 generated by all deliveries, distance traveled, and total number of deliveries to their various locations, etc. What I’m trying to uncover is no different from that of other business cases. I’d like to know where waste exists and how to eliminate it. The only difference is that the factor of time is weighted against the amount of pollution caused. Having things JIT (Just in Time) may cause more pollution and that is an important thing to consider. 
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