Thinking outside ‘the Box’: Designing a Packaging Take-Back System (original) (raw)

2004, California Management Review

he electronics industry is characterized by highly optimized global supply chains, outsourced manufacturing, and critical time-to-market pressures. Despite these high-priority concerns, many firms and industry groups are finding time to manage the environmental impact of their products. Product-specific environmental improvements are difficult due to rapidly changing technology and production methods. Thus firms have been looking for ways to reduce the overall environmental burden of their products by looking at packaging, purchasing, facilities management, and their supplier networks. In this industry, transportation and packaging of electronic components and subassemblies is often accomplished in single-use packages via airfreight. Since packaging waste and the effects of transportation are amongst the most significant sources of the environmental burdens of electronics, there are big opportunities for improvements. We worked with one of these companies, Quantum Corporation, a computer storage products company, to design and assess a new packaging system for their bulk hard disk drives shipped to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) worldwide. The system involved a packaging design with a smaller environmental footprint and, more significantly, collection and reuse of the used packaging from OEM sites worldwide. As of the year 2000, Quantum Corporation was the highest volume global supplier of hard disk drives (HDD) for personal computers, and sold a broad range of storage products to OEMs and distribution customers worldwide. 1

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