ENVIRONMENTAL SUPPLY-LINE ENGINEERING - ECO-SUPPLIER DEVELOPMENT COUPLED TO ECO-DESIGN - A NEW APPROACH

This paper describes how Lucent Technologies' supply line can merge wi th initiatives that reduce the environmental load of a telecommunicati ons product during ifs life cycle. Governments, customers, and corpora tions worldwide are the principal drivers of this merger. In The Nethe rlands, such customers as PTT Telecom have begun issuing environmental statements pointing out how the environmental quality of a product de pends inherently on the environmental quality of ifs suppliers' compon ents. Concurrently, Lucent initiated a survey to determine the existen ce of environmental policies at 144 of ifs 5ESS(R) switch component su ppliers. The survey determined that 70% of these suppliers lacked form al environmental policies. As a result, Lucent developed a new approac h called environmental supply-line engineering and researched the poss ibility of incorporating it into its product realization processes (PR Ps) to improve environmental performance. Eco-supplier development and ifs interactions with eco-design, the end of a product's life, and te chnological innovations form the basis of this approach. If resulted i n the development of specific tools used to measure the environmental performance of suppliers, technologies, and components.