Modern business practices’ focus on sustainability is sourced from increased governmental environmental safety protection measures. Thus, businesses were subjected to implement measures to reduce their environmental footprint to reduce carbon emissions and stop global warming. However, while in some companies, implementation of sustainability policies was limited by recycling, in larger manufacturing organizations, implementation of sustainability applied to all production levels and sources of raw materials. Thus, the concept of greening the supply chain refers to measures businesses take to ensure the final products’ sustainability.
Supply chain sustainability plays an important role in the global promotion of environmental safety. Thus, as more large companies force their suppliers to use sustainable materials, they facilitate the change process throughout the world. One of the prominent examples of how sustainability can be managed in supply chains was demonstrated by Apple. The company is actively working on implementing sustainable technologies, such as renewable electricity, in its wide supply chain to make every step of production carbon neutral (Apple, 2022). Thus, greening the supply chain allows businesses to work together to reduce humanity’s environmental footprint and stop global warming.
However, a lack of supplier supervision can affect the successful implementation of supply chain sustainability management. Moreover, some businesses started implementing sustainable development goals without applying them to production and supply chains to mislead customers by ‘greenwashing’ their production (Johnsson et al., 2020). Therefore, it is important for businesses to maintain supervision over suppliers to ensure that greening the supply chain has positive outcomes for the environment.
In conclusion, this essay explained the concept of sustainability management of supply chains. The essay defined that large organizations play a big role in promoting suitability by creating more renewable energy sources through suppliers. Furthermore, the essay explained how the concept of greenwashing affects environmental safety by slowing down the process of global change. Therefore, businesses need to ensure that the implementation of sustainability in production is not used to deceive customers and has real positive environmental consequences.
References
Apple. (2022). Apple calls on global supply chain to decarbonize by 2030. Web.
Johnsson, F., Kalsson, I., Rootzén, J., Ahlbäck A., & Gustavsson, M. (2020). The framing of a sustainable development goals assessment in decarbonizing the construction industry – avoiding greenwashing. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 131, 1-13. Web.