9
FIT SIGMA in Green Thinking
9.1 INTRODUCTION
Miss Piggy once said, ‘It's not easy to be lean’. Her friend Kermit the Frog might have also said, ‘It's not easy being green, either’. Organisations are facing increasing challenges to balance business performance with environmental issues. Such challenges have created a new area of Green supply chain management and Green thinking. The term ‘Green thinking’ refers to the way in which every aspect of an organisation – innovations, policies, operations and processes – may be considered in the context of the sustainable environment.
Environmental regulations are also changing the way in which supply chains are designed and managed. The problem is that the sheer number of rules, other influences such as changing consumer sentiment and the complexity of global trade, make it difficult for companies to decide exactly how they should respond to these pressures. Firms must also address the ethical requirements of their corporate social responsibility (CSR).
On a global scale, industrial pollution is the main contributor to the so-called ‘greenhouse’ effect and global warming. The greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide, methane CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and nitrous oxide. Some scientists believe that increased emission of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, is causing energy to be trapped, thus raising the global temperature. Methane and carbon dioxide emissions are linked to much larger economic infrastructures and are much ...
