Current life cycle research suggests that a product's environmental impact is often largely determined by the environmental impact of production and transportation processes across the supply network. To date however, life cycle analysis research and supply network research have remained unlinked. The goal of this study is to address the research question: Do different configurations of a product's supply network yield different environmental performance? We posit that the different configurations of supply networks cause more or less work to be coordinated, yield different exposure to externalities, and different patterns of product and information flow. These mid-level effects lead to more or less economies of scale in resource usage and transportation, thus impacting environmental performance. This research explores these ideas using both modeling of large-scale databases and case studies of agricultural supply networks.
The practice of life cycle analysis is a common practice in industry, yet it has not been used to study the issue of process choice in manufacturing strategy. This work fills a void in the academic literature by proposing a theory of how the structure of a product's technology network might impact its environmental performance. This is the first study to empirically test the link between process structure and sustainability. If the hypotheses are true, this will suggest an entirely new dimension to environmental product design. Given two competing technologies or supply chains, designers can be steered towards ones with greater sequential, as opposed to pooled, interdependencies between processes.
Current research suggests that a product’s impact on the physical environment is largely determined by the environmental impact of production and transportation processes that extract and process raw materials and manufacture products. In order to make better decisions about how to design products and supply networks, we need to understand how the supply network that makes the product impacts the environmental performance of the product. The goal of this study was to address the research question: Do different configurations of a product’s supply network yield different environmental performance? We posited that the different configurations of supply networks cause it to be more or less difficult to optimize in both design and operation, thus impacting environmental performance. We tested our hypothesis by extracting and analyzing data from the Ecoinvent life cycle inventory database. We found empirical support that products that have more interconnected supply networks also have smaller carbon emissions related to their processes. This suggests that when products and their corresponding supply networks are more interconnected and dependent upon one another, there is more opportunity for collaborative design and optimization and thus improved environmental performance. The practice of life cycle analysis is a common practice in industry, yet it has not been used to study the issue of process choice in manufacturing strategy. Our work fills a void in the academic literature by proposing a theory of how the structure of a product’s technology network might impact its environmental performance. This study was also the first to test the link between process structure and sustainability, and our results suggest that designing environmentally friendly supply chains is a communal effort.
