Stimulating Investments in Energy Efficiency Through Supply Chain Integration

Abstract

Attention to energy efficiency is recently experiencing substantial growth. To overcome the several barriers currently existing that represent an obstacle to the successful implementation of the wide set of energy efficiency measures available, the cooperation among members of a supply chain offers a huge potential. In supply chains, in addition to the traditional coordination of the operations, the members may also share financial resources or act jointly on the capital market. This study presents a two-stage supply chain model considering the opportunity to invest in new energy efficient technologies which are affected by learning effects: the member of the supply chain with better energy performance and/or better financial conditions may find it more profitable to invest in the development of the energy efficiency of its partner. The objective of the model is to determine the optimal investment for each supply chain member so as to maximize the Net Present Value of the supply chain. The impacts of the proposed joint decision-making are investigated through some numerical analysis and managerial insights are proposed: the joint decision-making process on the financial flows for the energy efficiency investments results are especially advantageous (up to a 20% increase of the supply chain Net Present Value) when members have different access to capital, which could be the result of different economic conditions in companies' countries, as well as different credit policies or different credit ratings.

Decision and Coordination in a Dual-Channel Three-Layered Green Supply Chain

“…At present, most of the literature relating to green supply chains mainly focuses on green procurement [23], green manufacturing [24], green logistics [25], green recycling [26], green supplier selection [27], and other aspects related to the green supply chain research. Additionally, since energy efficiency is a key resource for economic and social development [28], there is one research stream in the literature that pays attention to the energy efficiency of the supply chain solutions [29,30]. In this paper, we concentrate on the green production supply, freshness-keeping logistics, and green marketing of green supply chain.…”

Energy Efficiency in the Supply Chains of the Aluminium Industry: The Cases of Five Products Made in Sweden

“…Large energy savings can be achieved by using secondary or remelted aluminium instead of primary aluminium, and thus it is important to work together to increase the use of secondary or remelted aluminium. The collaboration between the companies in the supply chain has also been raised as an important issue in previous research, e.g., collaboration in general [6,7,13,16,18,19,21,24,43] or in regard to transportation [28,42], cleaner production [8,16,41], product design [8,10,17,41], environmental/sustainability goals [8,17], returnable packaging, energy-and eco-efficient products in use [8], financial investments [6,41,51], mapping of GHG emissions, environmental training and education [13], circular economy [31,50], management [6] and research and development [41]. Collaboration provides an opportunity for overcoming the barriers to energy efficiency [6].…”

Improving Supply Chain Profit through Reverse Factoring: A New Multi-Suppliers Single-Vendor Joint Economic Lot Size Model

“…The linkage between supply chain finance and sustainability has recently received the attention of scholars since suppliers and retailers have begun to care about the environmental and social sustainability of their supply chains. For instance, Marchi et al (2018) proposed a model to evaluate how the cooperation among members of a supply chain on investment decisions allows a chain to overcome, or at least mitigate, the several barriers currently existing for the implementation of energy efficiency measures. Aljazzar et al (2018) investigated delay-in-payments as a means of reducing carbon emissions in supply chains.…”