2Sustain

News about potential future guidelines to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has all of us wondering how supply chain operations will be changing in the not-too-distant future.

First, the EPA made headlines with its proposed declaration that greenhouses gases represent a health danger. Then, last week U.S. Representatives Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) introduced the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, which if passed, would have a significant impact on basic supply chain, transportation, and logistics practices.

If you’re starting to think about how your supply chain is going to respond to new legislation like this (and I hope you are), take a minute to check out Logistics Management for Jeff Berman’s latest article, “Green Logistics: Proposed Changes in Emissions Reduction Could Have Lasting Effect on Supply Chain Operations.”

Berman, who is the group news editor, does a nice job of exploring the probable impacts of proposed legislation, and he adds some solid advice from interviews with Brittain Ladd, director of logistics and manufacturing at Cognizant Technology Solutions, and Ryan Boccelli, director of logistics at Stonyfield Farm.

"A supply chain is a network of facilities and distribution options that performs the functions of procurement of materials; transformation of these materials into intermediate and finished products; and distribution of these finished products to customers,” Ladd explains. “Therefore, every new regulation restricting the production of GHG's will have a direct impact on supply chains, as supply chains are major contributors of GHG's. As more and more environmental regulations are implemented, [shippers] will be challenged to shorten their supply chains and introduce new technologies and business models in order to adhere to the new regulations.”