Managerial Issues in Closing the Loop

Abstract

The consequences for corporations striving to meet the new requirements of 'closing the loop' are investigated. An integrated managerial framework is developed to manage products over their complete life cycle. Effectively managing systems for 'closing the loop' requires a careful examination of the complex web of markets, government regulations, consumer behavior, supplier relationships and their impact on the value chain of an individual corporation. The underlying assumption is that developing a system atic framework of managerial issues for managing products over their complete life cycle is necessary to cope with the increased complexity caused by the tools related to 'closing the loop'. Although managerial issues are the focus in this paper, this does not imply that changing consumer behavior or a more incentive and innovation oriented regulatory approach are not of importance. Without such an approach only a few pioneers will follow a closed loop system.

Manufacturers’ Closed-Loop Orientation for Green Supply Chain Management

“…Previous literature on GSCM, closed-loop supply chain, and logistics management [12,29,37,67,73,[75][76][77][78][79][80][81] revealed that the essential factors of a closed-loop approach are recyclability, the flow of materials/products in the whole channel including both the forward and the reverse stages, entire life cycle perspective, etc. That is to say, the closed-loop oriented firms manage their materials/products from a holistic life cycle perspective to achieve the maximization of materials/components/products recycling.…”

Managing ‘green’ product innovation in small firms

“…In fact, these programmes have systemic impacts on the whole organisation, requiring the involvement of all the organisational units of the corporate management system, such as Marketing, R&D, Manufacturing, Purchasing, Logistics, and Quality Management. Moreover, environmental programmes entail actions on the whole supply chain, involving suppliers, retailers, customers, final users, and other non-traditional stakeholders (Roome, 1992;Steger, 1996); * the significant financial commitment associated with the introduction of environmental programmes (Walley and Whitehead, 1994); * the diversification of change drivers. Environmental pressures may vary considerably according to the industry and geographical location of a firm's activity (Azzone et al, 1997).…”

Analysing the determinants of environmental technology investments. A panel-data study of Spanish industrial sectors

“…In addition, the attractiveness to adopt a technology is likely to differ according to different technology types and economic and technical characteristics of the technologies (Clayton et al, 1999). 6 Regarding the analysis of environmental technological change more specifically, it has been scattered across different academic disciplines, including evolutionary economics (Rip and Kemp, 1998;Unruh, 2000;Foxon et al, 2005, among others), induced innovation theory (Ruttan, 2000), actor-network analysis (Luiten and Blok, 2004), industrial economics (Kerr and Newell, 2001;Cole et al, 2005), organisation studies (Khanna et al, 2006), environmental economics (Jaffe et al, 2002) and the corporate environmental management literature (Welford, 1996;Steger, 1996). Each has tended to focus on a narrow range of determinants and particular levels of analysis (Bernauer et al, 2006).…”