Supply chain next in green movement

SUPPLY AND DEMAND: Gem Plumbing & Heating uses a computerized dispatch center to help its vehicles find the most efficient route. The company utilizes green consulting firm GECKO Inc. /
SUPPLY AND DEMAND: Gem Plumbing & Heating uses a computerized dispatch center to help its vehicles find the most efficient route. The company utilizes green consulting firm GECKO Inc.
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It’s clear that George O’Loughlin, who last year started a no-fee green consulting firm called GECKO Inc., doesn’t want to be the heavy.
He doesn’t want to have to lie in wait and take candid photos of trash haulers mixing recycling and trash as they attempt to save on transportation costs. He doesn’t want to have to give an end-of-service threat to a supplier who declines to help create a greener supply chain. Still, as the leader of the nonprofit Green Earth Corporate Kindness Organization, which works with companies to pass green methods down their supply chain, O’Loughlin would, if necessary, take such steps.
“Making the supply chain greener is a huge issue, and it’s a much more complicated process than people think,” he said last week. “It doesn’t just have to do with packaging or the way products are delivered. It goes so far as to the people who have established relationships with trash haulers and the way the companies work together. … So we actually get in on the phone calls.”
Not all companies are able to use services like O’Loughlin’s GECKO – although it’s only a free, two-employee operation working out of an 800-square-foot Coventry office – but it is representative of a trend in Rhode Island: companies that want to be green are pushing for greener products and suppliers.
For builders and installers, that can mean demanding green products that are “not in the marketplace yet,” said Connie McGreavy, chair of the Rhode Island Green Building Council.
“It’s often up to the person who’s doing the end product to demand that its suppliers, whoever supplies the parts, give them a better product,” she said. “And that’s the hard part – not all manufacturers are willing to go do the hard work that’s required to do that, because they have established relationships and they’re easy.”
O’Loughlin, who was one of the founders of Log On America Inc. in the late 1990s, says he is using his savings to finance GECKO and has an advertising grant from Google. In the future, he hopes to have business donors or additional grant funding, too.
O’Loughlin has worked with 10 mid-sized Rhode Island companies and nonprofits, including the Providence Housing Authority, and is now working with Gem Plumbing & Heating, an installation company that has been rapidly expanding its green offerings. In the five years since Gem started installing solar panel systems and other renewable energy systems, that branch of the company has grown to 10 percent of its total business and created about 15 jobs that annually pay a total of more than $1 million, owner Larry Gemma said. Even before it started work with GECKO, Gem was pushing for greener supplies. After the company started installing renewable energy systems, Gemma started thinking about the impact that its external operations were causing.
“We were taking stuff into our warehouse, [unpacking] it and putting it on our shelves and throwing away or recycling the packaging,” Gemma said. “So we started to think about source reduction. Why do we need to take in packaging if we’re just going to throw it out?”
So the company started asking its vendors to ship their product to them with less packaging. And, from there, many of their manufacturers started cutting the packaging down on shipments to other installers, too, Gemma added.
There is, of course, a concern that reducing the packaging will cause more products to break in transition to Gem, Gemma said. And that concern has already caused some manufacturers to rethink the way they build their products – some water-heating tanks, for example, are now being made with a plastic exterior that’s less prone to denting than the traditional metal.
With GECKO’s help, the company is now looking at the actual production of the products it installs.
“And I think that’s what a lot of companies are doing now, looking down the supply chain and seeing how sustainable it is,” Gemma said.
There is sometimes added cost that’s associated with buying green building supplies, McGreavy said, but if more construction companies seek a local, sustainable product, it’s more likely that that product will become available.
If, for example, every local company requested sustainable wood cabinets – built with Forest Stewardship Council-approved wood – instead of chemical-filled particle board, “then you might see new agricultural suppliers creating new markets for these new sustainable woods” in Rhode Island, McGreavy said. That would eventually cut down the cost for contractors. It is, however, a choice that has to be made by each construction company or contractor, McGreavy added.
And while a group of mid-sized companies, like those that O’Loughlin deals with, could together change the way their suppliers produce and deliver products, some bigger corporations will undoubtedly have greater ability to do so by themselves. Starbucks Coffee Company Facilities Service Manager Leo Labossiere, who handles capital projects and renovations for 100 stores in New England, said his company is about to start a drive to change its supply chain.
“Most of my materials, I can source at local levels,” said Labossiere, who is based in Smithfield, “and the first products I look for are green products.”
He’s able to use many green products. But because they are not always cost-effective, sometimes he can’t.
At its Garden City Center location, for example, Starbucks recently replaced much of the cabinetry with materials that weren’t FSC approved. But, Labossiere said, it will be Starbucks’ official policy, starting next year, that any cabinetry job will require the use of sustainable wood.
“All new stores going forward from 2010 will be LEED-certified,” he added. And the company, which leases space for almost all of its stores, is also now using its corporate muscle to push for green construction on new buildings where it will locate. “We have the power to do that,” Labossiere said.
Although greening the supply chain shouldn’t necessarily have to be a forceful effort, sometimes it has to be done that way, O’Loughlin said. In Rhode Island, where most construction companies are required to recycle much of their waste, working with trash haulers can sometimes be difficult, he added.
“Let’s say, for example, that your staff caught them doing that – rejoining materials that you had separated for recycling and nonrecycling – and you thought that they were going to do it again,” O’Loughlin said. “I would show up with a camera at 7 o’clock in the morning to catch them, because it is illegal in Rhode Island.”
He added that, so far, just the threat of such an action has scared potential offenders. But his camera is ready. •

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