Lecture 3: 05 January 2009

In the lecture on 05 January, we had a quick re-cap on what we studied so far.

On voluntary initiatives, we touched upon ISO-14001 (we will study this further later); voluntary initiatives also include industry codes like the "Responsible Care" of the Chemical Industry. This can also be company specific procedures that will save the company from environmental disasters/litigation.

We learnt that there are environmental issues throughout the life-cycle of a product, from design onwards, through manufacutring, supplychain, logistics (transportation/warehouse), use and disposal of products. We discussed how Command & Control, economic instruments and voluntary initiatives apply to various stages of the life cycle of the product. For example, at the design stage one has to consider the requirements of RoHS and WEEE (both of legislative requirements of EU); we saw some examples as to how organizations had banned certain substances like Cadmium in 1984, well before the ban of this substance through legislation in 2006 (voluntary initiatives). Designing products with high energy efficiency may qualify these products for preferential purchases (economic instruments). Likewise we can see that the conflict resolution techniques are used throughout the life-cycle of the product. Use of command and control (all applicable legislation related to resource use and emissions and discharges) in manufacturing is well known. They are equally applicable to the supplier units.....an so on.

Design of the prodcut decides if the product at the end of life goes for reuse, recycling, remanufacturing, and repair (cradle to cradle) or to landfills or incineration (cradle to grave). Product design plays an important role in the total life-cycle environmental impact of the product. Product Design that takes into consideration the ecological and economical aspects throughout the life cycle of the product is called the Design for the environment (or Eco-Design). We discussed the design for energy efficiency (e.g. dolphin of Honda), design for disassembly, design for recycling, design with lower mass (e.g. gas assisted moulding)...we discussed about the possibility of using Al instead of steel in motor vehicles....we debated the "for and against" this concept. I explained to you the six focal areas of Eco-Design being used by Philips, Viz., Mass, energy, substances, recyclability, packaging and life. We touched upon the concept of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which is a tool, although mostly in the realm of academics, for assessing the environmental performance of a product. One of the points that I highlighted was that our decisions should be based on the total life-cycle environmental impact of the product rather than the environmental impact during one phase of the life cycle.

As for the advantage of eco-design I compared the potted version of the 40 W electromagnetic ballast with open construction electromagnetic ballast; the saving per year for India is in terms of copper (300 tons), steel (1500 tons), polyester resin (1000 tons) and power (35 MW) if we change all the potted versions to open construction ballasts. The point that I made was that a small change at the design stage can have far reaching ecological and economical consequences during the total life cycle of the product. We talked about how we in India still use energy in-efficient products adding to the global warming; we also talked about how many countries are phasing out energy in-efficient products (e.g. electric tungsten incandescent lamps). We touched upon the efforts of the Bureau of Energy Efficiency's energy labelling programme for electrical appliances, enabling the customer to know the energy efficiency of the product that he buys.

We will continue with some of the life-cycle issues in the next lecture

During the second hour we continued with the reading of the article, "The link between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility" by Porter and Kramer. The main point that we learnt was that the four drivers for CSR activity in organizations, viz., (a) Moral Obligation, (b) Sustainability, (c) Licence to operate and (d) reputation and image do not help the organization to approach CSR from a strategic point of view.....

We will continue the reading tomorrow too. Tomorrow we start from the paragraph starting with, "A few corporations such as Ben & Jerry's...."