GOING GREEN

Going Green



Going Green

Introduction

In response to growing concerns about global warming and climate change, in 1990, the U.S. Congress passed the National Environmental Act, which required the national Environmental Protection Agency to create the Office of Environmental Education within the Office of Public Affairs.

Because the United States is a federal system, each state was given responsibility for implementing the act according to specified federal guidelines. Each of the 50 states set out to comply with the act based on varying degrees of commitment to the concept of sustainability. State green initiatives were implemented across the United States under pressure from individuals, environmental groups, state legislators, and educators.

Within each state, many educational institutions used state green initiatives to carry out their own sustainability agendas. More than 600 American colleges and universities signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, and 378 became members of the Association of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future. More than 600 institutions of higher learning committed themselves to striving for carbon neutrality. In 2007, the College of the Atlantic, located in Bar Harbor, Maine, became the first college to achieve that carbon net zero goal.

In general, private schools have proven able to move at a faster pace in their efforts to achieve sustainability goals. This is partly because they tend to have more control than public institutions over their efforts, and they may also have greater access to financial resources. Statewide green initiatives are at varying stages of development, but the fact that they exist at all is clear evidence that state governments, educational institutions, and business and community leaders are responding to calls for greater efforts toward sustainability in the United States (Chamberlain, 2004).

Article 1

Problem Statement

What are the issues of corporate environmental management and traditional pollution control and risk management?

The article under review is “Understanding Green Purchase Behavior: College Students and Socialization Agents” by Ruoh-Nan. Out of all business operations, manufacturing processes are viewed to have the highest impacts on the environment, in the forms of pollutant generation, ecosystem disruption and depletion of resources. The pressures and drivers from abroad accompanying globalization have pushed manufacturers in developing economies like China to improve their environmental performance. Environmental concerns gradually become part of the overall business culture and, in turn, help re-engineer the development strategies of corporations.

Corporate environmental management (CEM) has been moving from traditional pollution control and risk management towards product life-cycle management and industrial ecology. Recently, CEM has extended to certain boundary-spanning activities like green procurement, product stewardship, reverse logistics and so on.

These practices are related to supply chain management, which requires various interactions between the core manufacturer and the other entities along the supply chain, either the upstream suppliers or downstream distributors and customers. The concept of supply chain management for environmental protection was first put forward by Drumwright (1994), which identified the characteristics of those companies introducing new manufacturing ideas. Later, green supply chain management (GSCM) was defined as a new term by the Manufacturing Research Association at ...