Supply Chain Sustainability—Drivers, Inhibitors, Solutions - Technology Management for Sustainable Production and Logistics - page 73

4.3 Inhibitors of Sustainability
Despite market demand for green products like vehicles with higher fuel-con-
sumption-efficiency, lower air pollution, failure to implement green innova-
tion practices or invest in environmental management prevented the expected
improvement in environmental investments. There are several reasons of such
complications. Reducing the weight of cars is one of the techniques to reduce fuel
consumption during use. This is usually done by substituting plastics, aluminium
and composites for steel in cars. However, this technique makes disassembly more
difficult, and therefore negatively affects the recycling of end-of-life vehicles (van
Hoek 2002 ).
Companies tend to assume an internal rather than a supply chain perspec-
tive while planning to implement environmental initiatives (Vachon and Klassen
2006 ). In many cases sustainable solutions are still limited to the single member
of supply chain. Improvements to existing technologies and reductions in resource
inputs, materials and wastes, referred to only single facility or entity. Even when
a completely new “clean” technology is introduced, it often results in a single
change of environmental performance such as CO 2 emissions or lower water con-
sumption but the change within supply chain is slight. Such a situation may be met
when a manufacturer uses just-in-time practice which improve environmental per-
formance in a particular facility, forcing its suppliers to more frequent deliveries.
Such solution leads to increase of the energy usage in logistics, because of more
frequent deliveries.
Interviews with chosen managers and workers from different manufacturing
sectors and logistics industry show that companies still face huge difficulties in
managing sustainability. The negative factors related to external and internal inhib-
itors remain still an obstacle. There are many examples of them:
• cost implications, when cost is much higher than expected before launching the
new eco-innovation processes, projects, products and services,
• for many irms (especially in logistics industry) new issues (like new eco-efi-
cient cars) are simply too costly,
• insuficient resources—especially small irms are not likely to have needed
equipment,
• ambiguous law and regulations,
• a misperception of what should be done,
• lack of guidelines on how to implement environmental initiatives,
• unclear or too restrict regulations,
• fragmented and complex regulations,
• lack of support from governmental institutions in terms of regulations,
• insuficient communication with standard-setting agencies,
• incomplete information from regulation institutions,
• lack of lexibility of regulatory institutions,
• too restrictive inspections,