Sustainable Operations

Business sustainability integration is a complex task and strongly linked to operations management. In fact, sustainability based approaches demand operations management boundaries' expansion, creation and integration of new performance goals into traditional company's performance management system, and new criteria and policies for operations' decision areas development. The challenge is to conduct more sustainable operations through companies' value chain and their operations network. Maturity models have been used in different areas as a process improvement and change management model for complex contexts. In sustainable operations management area, maturity models have been developed for specific purposes, e.g., sustainable production, sustainable supply chain management, corporate social responsibility, and life cycle management. However, there is a lack of models that considers sustainability integration through the evolution of sustainable operations' capabilities in an integrated way. Based on literature review and results from two panel studies conducted with academics and practitioners, this paper proposes a maturity framework for sustainability integration guided by sustainable operations capabilities evolution. The findings pointed out that its is possible to identify an evolutionary path, which goes from an initial approach focused in compliance aspects and firm's value protection to an innovative approach, based on corporate social responsibility supporting operations' integration in a sustainable system, and long-term values development. The experts' studies identified key processes that need to be prioritized in each level, and also evaluate the adaptation of some elements from Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) to sustainable maturity framework design. The framework represents company's vision regarding its value chain and operations network, and it is indicated for manufacturing companies.

Sustainable operations have become extremely important for the survival of present day shipbuilding business wherein triple bottom-line criteria – profit, planet and people, needs to be satisfied. This paper discusses about recapturing value at the end-of-life of a ship and reintroducing it to the value chain through reverse supply chain channel, thereby reducing environmental impact and also benefitting humans and ecology. It also describes about the advantages of recycling ships vis-à-vis scrapping it in terms of environmental and human impact.

Integrating sustainability in companies' agenda is a complex and multidisciplinary task. Based on the results of a survey conducted in 2015 with 106 respondents from manufacturing and infrastructure companies in Brazil, this research aims to verify the organization of a list of the main sustainable operations management capabilities that can provide companies with a path to achieve a higher level of maturity regarding sustainability integration. The research contributes by mitigating the lack of frameworks that seek alignment between operations with sustainability issues, helping to guide the strategy and to audit the level of sustainability integration.

Increase in environmental concerns together with legislations are forcing industries to take a fresh look at the impact of their supply chain operations on the environment. This paper introduces a mixed-integer linear programming based framework for sustainable supply chain design that considers life cycle assessment (LCA) principles in addition to the traditional material balance constraints at each node in the supply chain. Indeed, the framework distinguishes between solid and liquid wastes, as well as gaseous emissions due to various production processes and transportation systems. The framework is used to evaluate the tradeoffs between economic and environmental objectives under various cost and operating strategies in the aluminum industry. The results suggest that current legislation and Emission Trading Schemes (ETS) must be strengthened and harmonized at the global level in order to drive a meaningful environmental strategy. Moreover, the model demonstrates that efficient carbon management strategies will help decision makers to achieve sustainability objectives in a cost-effective manner. Please cite this article as: Chaabane, A., et al., Design of sustainable supply chains under the emission trading scheme. Please cite this article as: Chaabane, A., et al., Design of sustainable supply chains under the emission trading scheme. Please cite this article as: Chaabane, A., et al., Design of sustainable supply chains under the emission trading scheme.