Hotspot Scenario Analysis

Abstract

SummaryIncreasingly, organizations are working to reduce the environmental footprint of their supply chains. The use of environmentally preferable purchasing criteria is one strategy organizations use to address this goal. However, evaluating the environmental performance of these criteria (e.g., recycled content, biodegradable, renewable, and so on) has remained elusive. Life cycle assessment (LCA) can measure the impact reduction potential of sourcing strategies. However, full process-based LCAs are time-consuming and costly across multiple criteria of thousands of products and inputs purchased in an organizational setting. A streamlined "hotspot" methodology is presented using a combination of environmentally extended economic input-output (EEIO) approaches and extant literature to identify hotspots in which to constrain a parameterized process-based LCA. A case study of breakfast cereal manufacturing is developed to (1) assess the efficiencies associated with the hotspotting approach and (2) demonstrate its applicability in generating comparable decision signals of environmentally preferable sourcing criteria for procurement and supply-chain managers along the dimensions of global warming potential and water use.

Same Supply Chain, Different Models: Integrating Perspectives from Life Cycle Assessment and Supply Chain Management

“…Carbon footprinting as a subtool within LCA has been developed with more industry input from the beginning, and hence is somewhat more cognizant of practical limitations, but a full product-or corporate-level CF for every significant decision is equally impossible. I-O methods (Hendrickson et al 2006), hybrid LCA (Suh et al 2004), streamlined LCA (Hochschorner and Finnveden 2003), hotspotting (Pelton and Smith 2015), and portfolio-level footprinting (Meinrenken et al 2012) are some of the responses that have come from the IE community to address the need for more quick-and-dirty estimates. Data collection may be expedited by integrating environmental impacts within firms' existing software systems, such as internal accounting systems, enterprise resource planning systems, or product design software (Melville and Whisnant 2014), as exploited successfully by Meinrenken and colleagues (2014).…”

“…), hybrid LCA (Suh et al. ), streamlined LCA (Hochschorner and Finnveden ), hotspotting (Pelton and Smith ), and portfolio‐level footprinting (Meinrenken et al. ) are some of the responses that have come from the IE community to address the need for more quick‐and‐dirty estimates.…”

LiSET: A Framework for Early‐Stage Life Cycle Screening of Emerging Technologies

“…While LCA aims at providing a comprehensive assessment of multiple environmental impact categories (e.g., acidification, resource depletion, climate change) (Pelton and Smith ), LiSET aims to quickly map a large number of technology candidates and pinpoint hot spots of damages to human health, ecosystems, and resource availability. A decomposition analysis ensures that all life cycle impacts are considered.…”

A Multi-Objective Optimization Model for Green Supply Chain Considering Environmental Benefits

“…Enterprises are more willing to adopt GSCM practices because of increasing environmental pressures [19]. The most widely cited GSCM operation in the literature refers to operation performance [20,21], operational processes [22,23], the reduction of waste and environmental impact [24,25], and the development or selection of suppliers [26,27]. At present, a number of studies are investigating the influence of environmental concerns in supply chain management, such as those by Beske-Jannsen et al [28] and Sancha et al [29].…”