2014-Sustainable Industrial Processing Summit
SIPS 2014 Volume 6: Rare Earths & Ionic Liquids
| Editors: | Kongoli F |
| Publisher: | Flogen Star OUTREACH |
| Publication Year: | 2014 |
| Pages: | 432 pages |
| ISBN: | 978-1-987820-08-9 |
| ISSN: | 2291-1227 (Metals and Materials Processing in a Clean Environment Series) |
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Identifying Supply Chain Risks for Critical & Strategic Materials
James Goddin1; Will Martin2; Kim Marshall2; Andrew Clifton3;1M, M, Great Britain; 2GRANTA DESIGN LIMITED, Cambridge, Great Britain; 3ROLLS-ROYCE PLC, Derby, United Kingdom (Great Britain);
Type of Paper: Regular
Id Paper: 78
Topic: 9
Abstract:
For many companies, understanding the environmental impacts of their products and operations is rising up the business agenda. Business drivers include:
- Legislation on energy consumption, hazardous substances and conflict minerals.
- Volatile material and energy prices.
- Product marketing, brand value and Corporate Social Responsibility
- Stimulus for product innovation
Despite these significant and growing pressures, many companies have not yet been able to implement systems or tools to effectively manage the environmental issues associated with the product they develop.
It is acknowledged that approaches such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) generally require significant knowledge and expertise, both to perform the analysis and to understand the results. Furthermore, the LCA approach is substantially divorced from product development activities as it is generally applied at the end of the product development process. This results in poor engagement of designers and engineers with environmental issues and a general lack of support (or capability) to address these issues within the organisation.
This paper introduces an on-going, industry-based project that is attempting to overcome these implementation barriers by adopting a risk-based approach to the management of product sustainability issues. Working with partners from the aerospace, defence and security sector, the project aim is to integrate product sustainability into the strong culture for business risk management that already exists within companies in this sector. By presenting product environmental sustainability issues in terms of the business risks they engender and by integrating with existing business risk management systems, it is believed that a business risk-based approach will result in a wider understanding of environmental issues and ultimately result in these issues being managed as a normal part of the engineering design process.