Consumerism has been nourished and nurtured by the underlying economic principle that a progressively greater consumption of goods is beneficial to the collective economy. Behind such a free market of commercially-minded demand-driven supply chains is the heavily-priced tag of a ticking time bomb in fine-print, nothing short of an aneurysmal hemorrhage, that threatens to wipe out the very existence of this earth. The earth has now been served on the platter.
THE TICKING TIME BOMB
The best supply chains of the world are the economically-sustaining and successful ones that have garnered the love of both the stock bazaar and the stock-market bazaar. With the impending drought of natural resources that has been fueling these supply chains, the physiological strata of Maslow’s pyramid awaits to be shaken warranting the arduous task of retrofitting economically-sustaining models with an ecologically-sustainable-yet-economically-viable green value chain models. The best quoted innovations in the supply chain were built around the elite financially-driven value metrics with hardly any emphasis on the Green Supply Chain Operational References (SCOR). The so-called green adoptions of the day within the supply chain realms would have still manifested irrespective of any pro-environmental drivers. With consumerism being the fodder, the demand-driven phenomenon continues to drive every supply chain to approach their optimal points of cost efficiency. With no barriers at short-sight and with the consumers as catalyst, the gold rush continues, promptly aided by marketing czars with their green-wash techniques that have served both escapist and capitalistic tendencies. Click here for an interesting analysis on brand maps.
DEFUSING THE BOMB
Responsible consumerism seems like just an oxymoron. Be it their demographical plight of chance or a ride through trough- economic happenstance, the DNA of a consumer is to weigh the reward-penalties to base their consumption behavior. The naivety of the consumers is that they are heavily influenced by positional externality, some of them real, and many of them created by the manufacturers through fibs, vagueness, and media-focused propaganda. End-result, the consumers have pushed the demand for products (also read as by-products) that should never have existed. Exploiting on this upstream weakness, the downstream vendors hardly found a panic button to drastically reduce their net carbon footprint, which led me to believe that a true Green Supply Chain cannot evolve in a Demand-Driven network. Root cause found, the FUSE to defuse this ticking clock.
BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE SUPPLY CHAIN
The trick to solve the sustainability challenge is to strategically place the push-pull boundary. A phased approach of ending the pull-signals for selective product-segments and replacing them with a green-supply-driven push trigger could be the tipping point for sustainability.
For example, the purge of plastic bags at Walmart forcing consumers to either bring their own carry-on-bags or buy a reusable one at the counter is a master stroke of social responsibility. Though hard to embrace on Day 1, the cost of physical and financial hardship will enforce, train and imbibe a second nature in consumers to take the issue sustainability seriously.
Bottom-line, the real green initiatives are the ones that do not look green. Sustainability is spectrum agnostic!
