March for Science on Earth Day in Amherst, Massachusetts

We just returned from the March for Science in Amherst, Massachusetts, which many said was the biggest march they ever recalled in our great town. Marches for Science were planned in over 600 cities on 6 continents today.

My husband made our signs - he is a Professor of Engineering and had the posts neatly nailed.

We had received the notice about the march from a colleague at UMass Amherst, Dr. Barbara Pearson, and had also read about it in our local paper.  If I had not been marching I would have been revising another paper and refereeing one for a journal; these activities could wait - the march could not.

Below are some photos taken from the march which took almost 30 minutes for us to process from Kendrick Park in Amherst to our Town Common where a sustainability fair was taking place since it is Earth Day!

What I found so impressive was the sense of community today and a true sense of purpose. Below are some photos taken of the March for Science in Amherst. Seeing colleagues from UMass Amherst and other colleges and universities, friends, and neighbors, along with many children and dogs, demonstrates how universal the importance of science is to us and our world.

 

It was terrific to see Dr. Linda Slakey, former Dean of NSF at UMass Amherst, and NSF program officer, who gave a marvelous speech before we marched!

It was also great to see my Operations Research colleague, Professor Erin Baker, and her husband, as well as to chat with Dr. Connie Daniel, a management professor and Isenberg School of Management PhD alumna! We also saw Professor Sigfird Yngvesson of UMass Engineering and my colleague, and fellow Ukrainian and lover of anything Swedish, Dr. Bogdan Propovych.

Now it's back to research (and proofing two students' dissertations, whose committees I am chairing) with renewed energy and support and also fortified with the best cappuccino anywhere on the planet, from Amherst Coffee!

Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities, Earth Day, and Erice

Today is Earth Day on which we celebrate planet earth and the environment.

I have been hard at work on a presentation, Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities, which I will be presenting at a fascinating workshop, which will take place in early May, at the Ettore Majorana Scientific Center in Erice, Sicily. I had been then before, back in 2006, and it was a fitting ending to not only my year as a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard but also to the World Cup (Italy beat France and we were in Italy).

The title of the Workshop that I will be speaking at is given below.

      ERICE INTERNATIONAL SEMINARS ON PLANETARY EMERGENCIES

47th Session
Erice, 11 –15 May 2014

THE ENERGY PLANETARY EMERGENCY

Workshop on Energy, Cities, and the Control of Complex Systems.

I received the formal invitation from the Director and Chairman of the Ettore Majorana Scientific Center, Professor Antonino Zichichi. The workshop is organized by Professor Adlison Motter of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University,

http://dyn.phys.northwestern.edu/  and by Dr. Robert Schock, Center for Global Security Research, Energy Permanent Monitoring Panel, World Federation of Scientists:

http://www.federationofscientists.org/PMPanels/Energy.asp.

The list of invited participants is below.

 

The full workshop program can be downloaded here.

In my presentation I will present both a supply chain network design model with a focus on frequencies, which is in press in the journal Environment & Planning B and will discuss highlights of a model developed with Drs. Min Yu and Jonas Floden on sustainable supply chain network competition and game theory with frequencies of supply chain activities as strategic variables and product path flows. This paper was recently published in the journal Computational Management Science in a special issue devoted to Planet Earth.

Top Models for Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain Management

Today is Earth Day, so I would be remiss if I were not to post about supply chains and the environment.

When I say "top models" I am speaking not of the three-dimensional kind that are featured in the media and ads and on the covers of glossy magazines (and you may be able to name your favorites either male or female), but, rather, I am referring to mathematical models, based on which we can make important decisions. Yes, some of my colleagues in operations research and the management sciences still hold on to their t-shirts with the logo "We Do It With Models."

Also, despite what today's The New York Times is reporting about declining sales of green consumer products (except in the case of "good" deals), sustainability matters.

Fast fashion and the apparel industry is global in nature -- of course, everyone wears clothes, and for those of us who live in New England, we wear different clothes, based on the season, and sometimes lots of layers of them.

Fashion and apparel supply chains are fascinating, and involve decision-making regarding global outsourcing versus in-house production and quick-response.

Also, today, we are living in a world where the competition is not among firms but among supply chains and, given the same price, what would a socially-responsible consumer do -- she would purchase the product that made less of a negative impact on the environment!

As for the models that we have been developing, they include supply chain network models for competition among different fashion brands with sustainability, also available from the publisher, the International Journal of Production Economics, as well as multicriteria decision-making supply chain network models that capture time versus cost tradeoffs, which will appear as the lead chapter in the forthcoming book: Fashion Supply Chain Management: Business and Industry Analysis.

Above is a photo of what I consider to be a very special gift, given to me by the participants in a workshop that I organized at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center on Lake Como in Italy, a fashion design mecca. The beautiful scarf with butterflies was made there locally and the silk was spun by silkworms! In fact, I find it too beautiful to wear and consider it art and a remembrance of a very special time.

And then there is Nancy Judd, an environmental educator and designer, who creates fashions out of recycled materials, including trash, some of which can then be put back in the compost pile!

Greening of Supply Chains and Earth Day

Today is Earth Day and there are many special celebrations going on to mark this day!

One of my passions is studying and analyzing supply chains in a holistic, system-wide way and finding ways in which supply chains can be made greener. Two aspects to this is to enhance the manufacturing links as well as the transportation links. As is well-known, today's supply chains are global in nature, so in order to reduce carbon imprints, and to assist in sustainability, one must capture all the supply chain network activities.

Interestingly, Louis Uchetelle writes in the New York Times that the Green Economy is Not Yet Made in U.S.A. (but we are working hard on this). The article quotes a colleague of mine at UMass Amherst, Dr. Robert Pollin, who has done studies for the administration estimating the impact and who is also optimistic: Clean energy is a huge opportunity to revive manufacturing. Last May, we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Pollin, who spoke in our Speaker Series at the Isenberg School on "How Green Growth Can Revive the Economy," and he was simply terrific!

Another aspect of greening of supply chains is to minimize the emissions associated with transportation and a big issue is how to keep those trucks coming back, as filled as possible. Ken Belson, also writing for the Times, in the Business of Green, in his article, Keeping Trucks Full, Coming and Going, notes that: Deadhead trips, as they are known, are a waste of fuel, money and time, and a producer of greenhouse gases. The article notes a neat, new initiative, known as Empty Miles, which is a program that is the brainchild of the Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Solutions Association, or VICS, a nonprofit group that tries to make the supply chain in consumer goods industries more efficient. Macy's (one of my absolutely favorite retailers) and J. C. Penney have both signed on. The more companies that sign on, the more the trucks will not be traveling empty, improving the flow of freight, while reducing emissions -- a win-win situation, which is terrific!

Let's celebrate the beauty of our Earth today and revel in knowing that by being more efficient, we can actually be more green!