International purchasing and environmental sustainability - Can they co exist ?

After the Copenhagen climate change conference there has been an increasing interest in purchasing, logistics and supply chain professionals about how they can contribute towards making the world a better place. This is evident in the increase in the number of articles from supply chain magazines on environmental sustainability. Some people perceive international purchasing bestowed with poor environmental sustainability. However I choose to argue the opposite with the following reasons.

Multinationals have raised the need for addressing sustainability globally - With the increasing number of multinationals in developing countries, there is an increasing need to ensure that their suppliers are environmentally sustainable to be as suppliers to them. Hence multinationals have served as a major driver in creating awareness and systems for environmental sustainability. We know from the climate change that sustainability needs to be addressed as a global phenomenon and not as a local/regional phenomenon.

Intermodal transport is a great need - Russia has recently inaugurated a gas pipeline of more than 2250 km from Russia in to East Asia. This event will invoke discussion about the trans-siberian railway network which is supposed to connect China and Europe. With this network inline it would perhaps be less carbon intensive to transport goods from China in to Northern Europe when compared to truck transportation from southern Europe. Hence with such infrastructural and governmental level involvement it is possible to make international purchasing co exist.

Planning for sustainability - Products that are based on platform design, where there is a large amount of standardization and modularization involved could result in better predictability of demand, reduce variation, reduce obsolescence risk and also increase the scale of sourcing volumes. This could be coupled with postponement of manufacturing to nearby customer locations. Such logistics strategies increase environmental sustainability but still make it viable for international purchasing.

Cross functional integration - International supply locations act as good sources of sustainable designs and hence act as good reason to source from them. In order to adopt these good practices from international locations there is a need for good cross functional integration in the company. This aids better understanding of internal requirement and also external opportunities/ideas.