Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
pure compliance to environmental standards,
implementation of incremental changes to adapt
to emerging trends (regulation or consumer's
expectations), and in few cases, more radical
strategies and ruptures in the business. In this
case, the aim is to modify industry's rules in a
continuum through the reinsertion of the business
into a broader socio-eco-political context. These
strategies are influenced by several internal (orga-
nization, leadership, etc.) and external (stakehold-
ers pressure) factors, that provide different signals
and incentives for these businesses to envisage
a more or less radical transition to a low carbon
economy and translate this perception into action.
Businesses will shape their green strategies as a
result of objective and perceived influence of:
•
The weigh of assets and the capacity to re-
deploy them on the short and longer term
•
Unions and employees influence on busi-
ness reconfiguration
•
Relationship with suppliers: and the ca-
pacity to weigh on them to re-orientate the
supply-chain organization or production to
greener considerations
•
Regulatory existing pressure and evolu-
tion, leading to more or less mandatory
reintegration of environmental concerns in
business
Unsurprisingly, strong shareholder influence
is a common denominator in all sectors, to this
respect, any green innovation is supposed to
yield profit according to traditional profitability
criteria. The impulse of a single manager convic-
tion is also often a significant transformational
driver. It enlightens the importance of managerial
considerations in the way to conceive successful
green strategies.
•
Consumer's preferences: the type of target-
ed buyer market and its capacity to evolve
to absorb green products (with or without
price premiums)
•
New entrants pressure: to this respect,
emerging economies such as India and
China are restructuring the landscape and
provide one of the main driver for a quick
adaptation of existing occidental business
models to the new reality of the global
economy. The oil case and automobile
case illustrate this very well: oil demand
increase in the future will be mostly driven
by China and India
19
The car market ex-
pansion will also takes place for a large
part in developing countries. As regards
the sportswear industry, these two emerg-
ing economies have a strong influence on
the delocalisation of the supply chain to lo-
calisation with lower production costs.
•
The outdoor sportswear companies have
envisaged the transition as an apposition of
green consideration over the perimeter of
activity they mastered the more effectively.
The drivers to change were their perception
of the market evolution towards greener
products, the emergence of clusters such
as the industry federation and NGOs push-
ing for increase environment reintegration,
and in some cases, internal leadership.
These influences led to strategies to reduce
impacts of corporate activities and to some
extent, the improve product specifications
(with the incorporation of recycled or or-
ganic material). However, the capacity to
move massively to eco-design products
taking into account the whole life-cycle
would imply to weigh on the supply chain
to profoundly reshape it. It would rather
come from a conjunction of efforts within
•
NGO and civil society pressure to take into
account environmental considerations and
influence a shift in business
•
Shareholders pressure: and how they suc-
ceed or not to balance financial criteria to
target long- term profitability over shorter-
term maximization
