Towards a global CO2 calculation standard for supply chains: Suggestions for methodological improvements

Improving the efficiency and sustainability of supply chains is a shared aim of the transport industry, its customers, governments as well as industry organisations. To optimize supply chains and for the identification of best practice, standards for their analysis are needed in order to achieve comparable evaluations. This need for an evaluation standard also applies to CO₂ emission calculations. This research focuses on the transportation within supply chains and possible approaches towards a global standard for calculating its CO₂ emissions. In the recent past, several organisations, national and international, have come forward with possible methods, tools and databases for the calculation of CO₂ emissions along supply chains, but almost all of them do not cover the entire transportation chain. Also standards for CO₂ emissions of products and production in general do exist but they do not take the particular requirements of transportation into consideration. Therefore a global standard specifically for transportation could not yet be introduced. The EN 16258 standard is the only international standard for emission calculation of transportation in supply chains. It was therefore analyzed as a possible starting point for a global standardization approach. Analysis shows it too contains gaps and ambiguities which render comparisons of supply chains difficult. These gaps of the EN 16258 are analyzed, followed by suggestions for methodological improvements for their closure. The research concludes with an outlook on next steps needed towards a global CO₂ calculation standard for transportation within supply chains.     

The longer and heavier vehicle debate: A review of empirical evidence from Germany

This paper aims to evaluate the likely effects of the adoption of Longer Heavier Vehicles (LHVs) from the perspective of logistics service providers (LSPs). The research consists of six case studies and a survey of companies which were involved LHV trials in Germany. Wider introduction of LHVs is being increasingly demanded so that road freight transport can better serve and support modern supply chains whilst achieving the desired eco-efficiency advancements. Available literature on LHVs puts a particular emphasis on five factors that need to be included in the assessment of their impact: energy efficiency, CO₂ emissions, costs, safety and infrastructure. The research provides an original and innovative empirical study refining and validating the current conceptual framework for assessing LHVs demonstrating it is a valuable tool and providing evidence that the vast majority of companies participating in our study, regardless of their size, were interested in the adoption of LHVs. However, it should be noted that a key limitation of the research is that by focusing on a single country case, the nature and scale of the findings may not reflect practice in other countries and sectors. There is also a need to examine the long-term sustainability of the improvements made.     

Estimation of cost and CO2 emissions with a sustainable cross-border supply chain in the automobile industry: A case study of Thailand and neighboring countries

CO₂ emissions are increasing because of the growth in the cross-border supply chain, which is leading the locations of assembly plants and suppliers to spread across a wider area. Given that one passenger vehicle needs more than 20,000 components and parts, the automobile industry exploits the cross-border supply chain. Recently, the free cross-border movement of people, goods, capital, and information has accelerated in Asia. Therefore, a sustainable cross-border supply chain is required to reduce both CO₂ emissions and cost. This study estimates total CO₂ emissions per vehicle including production and transportation processes in Thailand and neighboring countries and the change in CO₂ emissions based on future policy scenarios that consider the automobile market and locational conditions in 2030. The results show that locating production close to the place of consumption and the electricity emissions factors in each country should be considered.     

Sustainable cold supply chain management under demand uncertainty and carbon tax regulation

Increasing awareness of sustainability in supply chain management has prompted organizations and individuals to consider environmental impacts when managing supply chains. The issues concerning environmental impacts are significant in cold supply chains due to substantial carbon emissions from storage and distribution of temperature-sensitive product. This paper investigates the impact of carbon emissions arising from storage and transportation in the cold supply chain in the presence of carbon tax regulation, and under uncertain demand. A two-stage stochastic programming model is developed to determine optimal replenishment policies and transportation schedules to minimize both operational and emissions costs. A matheuristic algorithm based on the Iterated Local Search (ILS) algorithm and a mixed integer programming is developed to solve the problem in realistic sizes. The performance and robustness of the matheuristic algorithm are analyzed using test instances in various sizes. A real-world case study in Queensland, Australia is used to demonstrate the application of the model. The results highlight that higher emissions price does not always contribute to the efficiency of the cold supply chain system. Furthermore, the analyses indicate that using heterogeneous fleet including light duty and medium duty vehicles can lead to further cost saving and emissions reduction.     

Measuring supply chain risk: Predicting motor carriers’ ability to withstand disruptive environmental change using conjoint analysis

Supply chain risk measurement is an expanding research stream that considers the ability of networked firms to anticipate and respond to significant environmental risks, including major disruptions and unexpected events. However measuring and quantifying supply chain risk has proved an enormous challenge and this research contributes to this goal by developing a risk assessment scorecard, using conjoint analysis, for motor carrier firms. The resultant motor-carrier scorecard has been scaled from 300 to 900, to resemble the well-known FICO score for assessing consumer creditworthiness. Our scoring model enables motor carriers – and the firms that depend upon them in intermodal supply chains – to assess carriers’ ability to withstand major disruptive events, which are broadly defined as events which might lead to a significant drop in carriers’ income and profitability (e.g., such as that which occurred on September 11, 2001). Carriers with weaker risk scores (<600, on a 300–900 scale) are more likely to experience financial distress (and as a result possibly exit the industry itself); those with scores above 600 are less likely to depart. The model correctly identified 77 percent of motor carriers that ultimately exited the trucking industry following the significant environmental disruption caused by 9/11. Our computational experience indicates that the model accuracy, quantified in terms of Type I and Type II errors, compares favorably to prior results reported in the credit scoring literature.     

Measuring supply chain efficiency based on a hybrid approach

Supply chain management has a tremendous impact on the success of a company. One of the critical issues for gaining competitive advantages for companies is improving supply chain performance. Most studies about the application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Supply chain models do not identify the benchmarking units for inefficient supply chains. On the other, measuring the short run and long run of the supply chain efficiency is another challenge for decision makers in supply chain management. Hence, we propose a methodology of DEA for measuring of the supply chain. We integrated two approaches as special cases of the hybrid model and compare the short and long run strategies of supply chain and can be identified benchmarking.     

Green supply chain network design to reduce carbon emissions

We consider a supply chain network design problem that takes CO₂ emissions into account. Emission costs are considered alongside fixed and variable location and production costs. The relationship between CO₂ emissions and vehicle weight is modeled using a concave function leading to a concave minimization problem. As the direct solution of the resulting model is not possible, Lagrangian relaxation is used to decompose the problem into a capacitated facility location problem with single sourcing and a concave knapsack problem that can be solved easily. A Lagrangian heuristic based on the solution of the subproblem is proposed. When evaluated on a number of problems with varying capacity and cost characteristics, the proposed algorithm achieves solutions within 1% of the optimal. The test results indicate that considering emission costs can change the optimal configuration of the supply chain, confirming that emission costs should be considered when designing supply chains in jurisdictions with carbon costs.     

Freight Transport Deceleration: Its Possible Contribution to the Decarbonisation of Logistics

The paper challenges the conventional view that the movement of goods through supply chains must continue to accelerate. The compression of freight transit times has been one of the most enduring logistics trends but may not be compatible with governmental climate change policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60–80% by 2050. Opportunities for cutting CO₂ emissions by ‘despeeding' are explored within a freight decarbonisation framework and split into three categories: direct, indirect and consequential. Discussion of the direct carbon savings focuses on the trucking and deep-sea container sectors, where there is clear evidence that slower operation cuts cost, energy and emissions and can be accommodated within current supply chain requirements. Indirect emission reductions could accrue from more localised sourcing and a relaxation of just-in-time (JIT) replenishment. Acceleration of logistical activities other than transport could offset increases in freight transit times, allowing the overall carbon intensity of supply chains to reduce with minimal loss of performance. Consequential deceleration results from other decarbonisation initiatives such as freight modal split and a shift to lower carbon fuels. Having reviewed evidence drawn from a broad range of sources, the paper concludes that freight deceleration is a promising decarbonisation option, but raises a number of important issues that will require new empirical research.     

Assessing the energy and greenhouse gas emissions mitigation effectiveness of potential US modal freight policies

This paper estimates the total embodied energy and emissions modal freight requirements across the supply chain for each of over 400 sectors using Bureau of Transportation Statistics Commodity Flow Survey data and Bureau of Economic Analysis economic input-output tables for 2002. Across all sectors, direct domestic truck and rail transportation are similar in magnitude for embodied freight transportation of goods and services in terms of ton-km. However, the sectors differ significantly in energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and costs per ton-km. Recent pressure to reduce energy consumption and emissions has motivated a search for more efficient freight mode choices. One solution would be to shift freight transportation away from modes that require more energy and emit more (e.g., truck) to modes that consume and emit less (e.g., rail and water).Our results show there are no individual sectors for which targeting changes would significantly decrease the total freight transportation energy and emissions, therefore we have also looked at the prospect of policies encouraging many sectors to shift modes. There are four scenarios analyzed: (1) shifting all truck to rail, shifting top 20% sector mode choice, (2) based on their emissions, (3) based on a multi-attribute analysis, and (4) increasing truck efficiency (e.g., mpg). Increasing truck efficiency by 10% results in similar energy and emissions reductions (approximately 7% for energy and 6% for emissions) as targeting the top 20% of sectors when selected based on emissions, whereas selecting the top 20% based on availability to shift from truck results in slightly less reductions of energy and emissions. Implementing policies to encourage higher efficiency in freight trucks may be a sufficient short term goal while efforts to reduce truck freight transportation through sectoral policies are implemented in the long term.     

Competition and disruption in a dynamic urban supply chain

Rapid changes and complexities in business environments have stressed the importance of interactions between partners and competitors, leading supply chains to become the most important element of contemporary business environments. There is a concomitant need for foresight in describing supply chain performance in all operating environments, including those involving punctuated disruptions. Furthermore, the urban metropolis is now widely recognized to be an environment which is especially vulnerable to supply chain disruptions and for which integrated supply chain decisions can produce very substantial net benefits. Accordingly, this paper presents a dynamic supply chain network model formulated as a differential variational inequality; the model is fashioned to allow consideration of supply chain disruption threats to producers, freight carriers, and retail enterprises. The DVI is solved using a fixed-point algorithm, and a simple numerical example, introduced to illustrate how the impacts of supply chain disruptions may be quantified, is presented.     

New car preferences move away from greater size,weight and power: Impact of Dutch consumer choices on average CO2-emissions

This paper assesses the separate effects of consumer preferences and technological advances on sales-weighted average CO₂ emissions of new passenger cars in the Netherlands. Since 2008, consumer preferences have been moving away from large size, weight and power whereby car buyers were offsetting more than 50% of the potential CO₂ reduction from technological advances. From 2008 to 2011 consumer choices not only ceased to offset a large share of the technological advances, but contributed more than an additional 30% to CO₂ reductions. Had consumer preferences not decoupled from the historical upward trend, the Dutch sales-weighted average CO₂ emissions of new passenger cars would have been 139 g/km rather than the 126 grams CO₂ per km in 2011.     

The impact of alternative routeing and packaging scenarios on carbon and sulphate emissions in international wine distribution

There is a large body of research related to carbon footprint reduction in supply chains and logistics from a wide range of sectors; however the decarbonisation of freight transport is mostly explored from a single mode perspective and at a domestic/regional level. This paper takes into account a range of alternative transport modes, routes and methods with particular reference to UK wine imports from two regions: northern Italy and Southeast Australia. The research examines supply chain structures, costs and the environmental impact of international wine distribution to the UK. A number of options are evaluated to calculate the carbon footprint and sulphate emissions of alternative route, mode, method of carriage, and packaging combinations. The estimation of CO₂e emissions incorporates three main elements - cargo mass, distance and method of carriage; sulphate emissions are derived from actual ship routes, engine power and operational speeds. The bottling of wine either at source or close to destination is also taken into consideration. The key findings are: there are major differences between the environmental footprint of different routeing and packaging scenarios; the international shipping leg almost always has a much larger footprint than inland transport within the UK except in the hypothetical case of the rail shipments from Italy using flexitanks. With reference to sulphate, the lowest cost scenario among the sea maximizing options is also the sulphate minimising solution.     

A welfare cost assessment of various policy measures to reduce pollutant emissions from passenger road vehicles

Policy options to reduce passenger transport emissions in Europe are simulated with the EUCARS model. The EUCARS welfare analysis includes changes in consumer surplus, congestion and tax revenues. Simulations also address consumer myopia, i.e., the underestimation of fuel costs by car buyers. The best policy mix to reduce CO₂ consists of fuel taxes that are combined with differentiated purchase taxes to correct for the assumed myopia. This combination could reduce CO₂ emissions of over 25% without reducing contemporaneous well-being. For the reduction of conventional emissions, an equivalent best mix includes an emissions-based kilometre tax combined with a purchase feebate. This mix allows a 60% reduction in toxic emissions without any noticeable welfare reduction. The overall superiority of these two mixes compared to alternative choices is higher when the evaluation includes a broad group of externalities, a premium on public funds, and positive feedbacks across emissions categories. Local traffic management measures are important zero-cost complements for an overall emissions strategy.     

Build-to-order supply chain network design under supply and demand uncertainties

Supply chain disruptions are unintended, unwanted situations resulting in a negative supply chain performance. We study the supply chain network design under supply and demand uncertainty with embedded supply chain disruption mitigation strategies, postponement with downward substitution, centralized stocking and supplier sourcing base. We designed an integrated supply-side, manufacturing and demand-side operations network in such that the total expected operating cost is minimized. We modeled it in a deterministic equivalent formulation. An L-shaped decomposition with an additional decomposition step in the master problem is proposed. The computational results showed that parallel sourcing has a cost advantage against single sourcing under supply disruptions. In addition, the build-to-order (BTO) manufacturing mitigation process has its greatest impact with high variations on demands and is integrated with the component downward substitution. Lastly, the manufacturer needs to order differentiated components to cover its requirement for maximal product demand to prevent the loss of sale, even with fewer modules in stock.     

Reducing emissions through speed optimization in supply vessel operations

This paper examines how optimizing sailing speeds can reduce supply vessels emissions in the upstream supply chain to offshore installations. We introduce several speed optimization strategies to be used in construction of periodic vessel schedules. The strategies consider vessel waiting times before the start of service at installations and at supply base. Tests carried out on real instances from Statoil’s activities on the Norwegian continental shelf indicate that a 25% emissions and fuel cost reductions can be achieved without fleet size increase.     

Achieving sustainable development of supply chain by incorporating various carbon regulatory mechanisms

Nowadays, sustainability issues have received considerable attention in supply chain management because of the governmental requirements as well as expectations of the people. This paper introduces a novel supply chain network design problem to cover three dimensions of sustainability, namely economic, environmental, and social. The advantage of the presented model stems from considering the booming development aligned with reduction in environmental impact. In this paper, to achieve the mentioned benefits and to derive a more sustainable supply chain, a novel model in the presence of the most commonly used carbon policies is proposed. This paper, addresses sustainable development through imposing proper carbon regulatory mechanisms. Main contribution of this study is to consider the effect of imposing carbon policies on environmental advantages as well as improving the regional development level in a supply chain network design problem. Moreover, the shipment consolidation decisions are utilized to reduce cost as well as environmental impact. In addition, a novel mixed uncertainty approach is proposed to capture the uncertain emission parameters. The numerical examples and a case study are analyzed to evaluate the performance of the proposed models. It is concluded that, a high-growth economy with low-carbon can be made and also almost global well-being of people is ensured by applying the proposed model. Some managerial insights are provided for the enterprises of supply chains to make the most appropriate sustainable decisions. Finally, proper carbon emission policies are suggested based on the region sustainability characteristics.     

Modal split in offshore supply network under the objective of emissions minimization

We study modal split under the objective of emissions minimization in the transportation of cargo from centralized vendors in the oil and gas industry to decentralized supply bases on the Norwegian coast. The supply network includes direct road transport and a sea route along the coast. To gain insight into modal split decisions between road and sea transport from the shipper’s perspective multi-period mixed integer optimization models are formulated. Particularly the models give possibilities to examine how weekly demand patterns at supply bases, cargo commitments to sea transport, storage possibilities at supply bases, and shipper’s responsibility for a certain share of vessel capacity may effect the emissions and the modal split. Experiments on real data from an oil and gas company operating offshore show that the size of the share of vessel capacity and the possibility for storage at supply bases are the major determinants for a larger shift to environmentally friendly sea transport. The models can be used as means for making decisions regarding how a shipper can commit to sea transport to achieve less emissions.     

A point card system for public transport utilization in Korea

This study analyzes consumer preferences for a new incentive program based on a point card to promote green consumption; the study also examines the program’s impact on bus utilization in South Korea. An ex-ante analysis was conducted to examine how consumer behavior can be modified based on varying incentive levels of the point card system. In addition, the effect of the system on consumers’ public transport utilization and resulting CO₂ emissions reductions are analyzed. The adoption probability of the point card is forecast at about 93%, and annual CO₂ emissions are forecast to decrease by 610 kt CO₂.     

Asian economic integration and maritime CO2 emissions

The Asian region is considered as the most thriving region in terms of economic integration at present. Given the fact that most of the Asian countries’ commodity trade relies on maritime transport, its economic integration is expected to affect the shipping activities and consequently maritime CO₂ emissions. This study develops a novel and systematic analysis on the key driving factors through which trade liberalization can influence maritime CO₂ emissions. Our simulation results suggest that, depending on the level of Asian integration, global CO₂ emissions may slightly fall (ASEAN+3 FTA) or even rise (ASEAN+6 FTA). The reason for the latter is that the “trade scale effect” (higher emissions due to a significant increase in trade among participating countries) outweighs the “trade structure effect” and “shipment type effect” (lower emissions as a result of an increase in intra-Asia trade and a change in commodity composition). Finally, all countries involved in the Asian integration, except Japan, will experience an increase in maritime CO₂ emissions. In particular, a relatively significant increase in the maritime CO₂ emissions occurs in the developing Asian countries owing to substantial trade scale effect after removing their relatively high trade barriers.     

不同主导权结构下的双渠道供应链定价策略及协调机制研究

基于制造商开辟线上直销渠道与线下零售渠道构成双渠道供应链的背景下,结合实际的服务影响因素,对不同主导权结构下双渠道供应链各成员的定价策略和协调机制进行研究。分别构建制造商主导、零售商主导、垂直均衡三种分散决策下的两阶段Stackelberg博弈模型,研究发现相较于集中决策,分散决策下供应链成员在价格、需求、利润上均有所损失。为缓解渠道之间的矛盾与冲突,引入一种双向收益共享契约用于协调供应链。研究表明,在一定的收益共享范围内,双向收益共享契约可以完美协调供应链;对于主导企业而言,主导权越向自身集中,所需共享的收益比例也越小;随着零售商服务水平的增大,制造商的利润不断增大,零售商的利润不断减小,供应链整体利润呈先增后减趋势。