ICT and e-Business Impact in the Furniture Industry - empirica

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ICT and e-business impact in the furniture industryBusiness example:Hermann Miller integrates environment into product designIn 2002, the American furniture company Hermann Miller integrated designfor environment (DfE) as a core business strategy, implementing a three-part“protocol for sustainability” focused on infusing environmental attributes intoall of its new products and, eventually, into all of its existing ones. The ideabegan with customers’ growing questions about the environmental attributesof products.Hermann Miller's DfE strategy is based on three components: anenvironmental rating tool for new products; a materials database thatprioritizes existing environmentally friendly materials and spurs thedevelopment of new ones; disassembly guidelines and related trainingprocedures.The sustainability protocol was designed to integrate with the existingproduct development process. Each product evaluated by the system israted in three different areas: disassembly, material chemistry, andrecyclability. In each of those areas, designers use the tool to assign aseries of credits related to various design factors. If a product can becompletely disassembled down to its individual components, it gets a “credit”of 100%. A component that cannot be disassembled easily, such as a gluedassembly, receives a 0% rating.Similar ratings are given for “material chemistry”, the human health andenvironmental factors associated with each product component. Everymaterial contained in product is rated on a green/yellow/red colour schemeand assigned a corresponding credit, which is weighted based upon theamount of that material in the product. The third rating is given to eachmaterial based upon its recyclability, along with the material’s recycled orrenewable content.Finally, the three scores are compiled and the product is given an overallscore. The database that drives much of the tool is based on productinformation provided by suppliers. The overall goal is to continually improveeach product’s score by finding better alternatives to problematiccomponents, such as less-toxic dyes or reduced-VOC particleboard.Herman Miller is using the sustainability tool to assess all new launchproducts (roughly 10 a year) as well as existing products as they areupdated and relaunched.Source: The Green Business Letter, April 2002Proactive measures to eliminate waste or toxic substances have the added benefit of preemptingfuture legislation and minimizing potential liabilities in environment, health andsafety. Pollution prevention can be achieved in many ways such as reducing materialinputs, re-engineering processes to reuse by-products, improving management practices,and employing substitution of toxic chemicals. Some smaller facilities are able to actuallyget below regulatory thresholds just by reducing pollutant releases through effectivepollution prevention policies.In the furniture industry, different measures can be taken according to the main type ofmaterials used: wood, metal or plastic. The "greening" of the production process extendsto the whole supply chain, down to waste management and recycling.51
ICT and e-business impact in the furniture industryBusiness example:Recycling at Raymour & Flanigan FurnitureThe US company Raymour & Flanigan Furniture is on track to recycle 15.2million pounds of waste this year. “Furniture ships from our manufacturers incardboard, plastic and Styrofoam packaging,” Michael Goldberg, ExecutiveVice President, explained to Environmental Leader website. “Considering wesell on average 8,000 pieces of furniture each day, we generate a lot ofrecyclable material.”Raymour & Flanigan has renovated a 41,000 square foot recycling centre ontheir main campus to handle the material. What used to be sent to landfills isnow sent to the Recycling Centre in Liverpool New York for handling andprocessing. The recycled materials are used by other manufacturers tocreate new consumer products.Starting with a reduction process known as heat extrusion, technicians atRaymour & Flanigan take clean bulk Styrofoam and send it through a specialprocessing unit which reduces it to 10 percent of its original size to make anend product called an “ingot” weighing approximately 50 pound. Ingots areshipped to manufacturers instead of area landfills.The company’s goal for 2007 is to recycle 700,000 pounds of Styrofoam,13.2 million pounds of cardboard, and 1.3 million pounds of plastic.The recycling centres process all cardboard and Styrofoam generated fromthe company’s entire market area in the US Northeast. All plastics arerecycled at respective Customer Service Centers and bales of plastics arethen consolidated at the main recycling facility.Source: Environmental Leader, August 2007(http://www.environmentalleader.com)To cope with the “green issue”, an increasing number of companies are adoptingenvironmental management systems (EMS) and certifying them by internationalstandards. ISO 14001 is becoming the dominant international standard for assessingenvironmental management processes and in EU many firms are also registering theirEMS according to the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS). Although the SeBWdid not carry out a specific and systematic analysis about the adoption of environmentalmanagement systems and related certification in EU, examples have been found in manyEuropean countries. These examples range from large companies, such as the Italiangroup Scavolini – analysed as a case study in Section 5.7 – to medium sized ones (toquote an example the Spanish company Geromobel 38 ) also including handcraftcompanies (see the example of the Spanish company Almazán Mueble Artesano 39 .The environmental aspect of packaging material recycling is taken into consideration inorder to offer to the consumers an environmental-friendly image, part of a widercommunication strategy. When adopting this approach, the role of e-business is mainly insupporting the concurrent engineering process, with a comprehensive approach thatfollows the global environmental impact of the product. Environmental issues need to betaken into account from the product concept and design phase onwards, through3839See http://www.geromobel.com/index.html.See http://www.almazan-mueble-arte.com/empresa/index.php.52
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