A Framework for Assessing Eco-Efficiency


Speaker


Abstract

The increased awareness regarding the environment has lead companies to re-design their supply chains in order to decrease their environmental footprint. New supply chain activities, i.e. re-furbishing, re-using of spare parts, recycling have been implemented in the last twenty years to diminish environmental impact and generate extra profit. The re-design towards a “green” supply chain, however, does not always come from free. The challenge is therefore to propose new supply chains balancing business and the environment, or shortly to design eco-efficient supply chains.

We explore the set of the eco-efficient solutions or eco-efficient frontier via an ε-approximation of the efficient frontier. We choose a non-interactive method to assess the trade-offs between environmental pressure and costs, as well as to assess the decision maker preferred solution. The reason for a non-interactive method lies on the likely decision makers ‘s lack of familiarity with the environmental objective functions, which makes interactive methods,  i.e. STEM, Pareto-Race, unsuitable. We propose the approximation to achieve two conflicting objectives: to problem CPU-time tractable and to have a proper representation of the eco-efficient frontier.

We apply the proposed method on the design of an eco-efficient supply chain for waste electrical and electronic equipment in Germany.    

 

Contact information:

Naima Zerhane

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