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Green is better Dr Sreejith Balasubramaniam, lecturer at Middlesex University Dubai, explains the importance of green supply chain management in the UAE construction sector
The application of green supply chain management (GSCM), a systematic and integrated approach to reducing the environmental footprint across the various supply chain stages (from design to end of life) has witnessed significant interest in recent years. However, despite the burgeoning interest, the uptake of GSCM across various sectors has been uneven. This is because seamless application of GSCM warrants commitment and participation of all stakeholders in the supply chain, which is challenging, especially for sectors with complex supply chains such as the construction sector, in which the number of stakeholder firms involved in the supply chain could be in hundreds, if not thousands. The lack of application of GSCM in the
18 | Logistics News ME | January 2018
construction sector is a major concern given that construction is the single largest contributor to global carbon emissions, resource, water and energy consumption, and landfill waste. Curtailing the negative environmental impacts of the sector has become critical especially in emerging countries such as the UAE in which the sector is growing at more than 9% per year. The Developers The green decisions made by the developers at the design stage, such as the extent of natural ventilation, natural lighting, solar energy, waste water recycling system, and energy efficient heating and lighting system, could significantly and directly reduce the environmental impacts
during the operational phase of the building as well as it will eliminate the need for costly and disruptive refurbishments for reducing any environmental impacts during the post-occupancy stage. Similarly, the importance given by a developer to the environmental aspects vis-à -vis traditional aspects of cost, quality, and time during the awarding of the construction contract to architects/consultants and contractors could improve the overall environmental performance of the supply chain. Finally, at the end of a building’s useful life, developers could execute a carefully planned environmental friendly demolition process to maximise recovery and recycling of demolition waste instead of sending all the demolition waste to landfill.
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