General Strike Disrupts Spain but Our Conference Poster Makes It Through

If you have international collaborators, colleagues, and friends, you may hear of world news events before any official news reports.

This happened to me this morning, when I received a message from Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business. She was to present, with her doctoral student, a poster based on the paper that we have been working on, along with another co-author, Dr. Fuminori Toyasaki of York University in Canada. Both Tina and Fuminori had been my doctoral students at the Isenberg School of Management and are doing terrific research in supply chains and sustainability as well as in the financial funding of humanitarian organizations.

The title of our paper that was to be presented in poster format was, "The Influence of Technical, Market and Legislative Factors on E-Waste Flows" and the venue was the International Closed-Loop Conference in Zaragoza, Spain. A clip from the poster is featured above.

The message from Tina said that she had made it to Zaragoza, Spain and was at the International Closed-Loop Conference. The agenda for the conference can be downloaded here.

There was a general strike yesterday in Spain, so the trains did not run and they drove over a thousand miles by car (that is academic dedication). According to Mapquest, this trip is estimated at 19 hours!

Then Zaragoza was blocked because of people walking and striking, so they drove around for 2 hours.

They finally made it to the hotel around 10 PM.

Then the Internet did not work ....

Several of the conferees could not come because of cancelled flights (including Dr. Toyasaki). Other speakers were planning on Skyping in because they could not come as well.

Later, I read online about the general strike that had crippled Spain and that had brought transportation to a standstill. At least 58 had been arrested and there have also been injuries. The strike is against austerity measures of the government.

But our conference poster made it through, thanks to Professor Tina Wakolbinger and Thomas Nowak.

Now, they have to make it safely back to Vienna!

The Greening of the O.R. and Hospitals and Corporate Social Responsibility

Although we are living in a world of "throwaways" we are seeing an exciting convergence of corporate social responsibility, green logistics, healthcare, and even humanitarian operations through the recycling, redesign, and reprocessing of medical products and associated medical waste, so there is HOPE!

Interestingly, as The New York Times is reporting, in the article, "In a World of Throwaways, Making a Dent in Medical Waste," by Ingfei Chen, the biggest source of medical refuse is the operating room (O.R.), with 20-30% of a hospital's waste.

A nonprofit group in VA, Practice Greenhealth, is now working on reducing the environmental footprint of health care institutions with its Greening of the O.R. initiative, which is focusing on identifying the best sustainable practices for reducing operating room garbage, energy consumption, and indoor air quality problems, while lowering expenses and improving safety -- all fantastic goals! Reducing the waste associated with medical supplies and equipment,which can be achieved through recycling and reprocessing, for example, can save on new purchases and can also reduce landfill fees and incineration costs.

For example, according to the article, the Hospital Corporation of America, which owns 163 hospitals, eliminated 94 tons of waste last year through the reprocessing of medical supplies!

I am reminded of the similarity between medical waste and recycling and reprocessing issues to that of electronic recycling, or e-cycling, a topic that I have written about in the past, with Dr. Fuminori Toyasaki. Our paper, "Reverse Supply Chain Management and Electronic Waste Recycling: A Multitiered Network Equilibrium Framework for E-Cycling," remains as one of the top cited papers in Transportation Research E.

Dr. Ralph Pennino, the chief of plastic surgery at Rochester General Hospital in upstate New York, notes that surgeons have agreed to use standardized supply kits selected to cover most of their needs while leaving little unused, so that they can “work systems out so we don’t have anything to reprocess." This is said beautifully and speaks to the importance of designing health care supply chains and medical products accordingly, a topic that we have also been writing about, and where we specifically allow decision-makers to assign costs associated with oversupply/waste.

Dr. Pennino notes that leftover items are donated to InterVol, a nonprofit organization started in 1989 by him. Each week, its volunteers gather about 8,000 pounds of unused supplies and reusable equipment from regional health care facilities, then ship the stock to clinics in more than two dozen countries, including Somalia and Haiti. This is an example of the best in green logistics, healthcare, and humanitarian operations!

E-Cycling, Top Cited Papers, Electric Cars, and Copenhagen

With the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen next week, I thought it appropriate to highlight some of our environmental research at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks. Several years back my research team received two AT&T Industrial Ecology Fellowships, which supported the environmental research at the Supernetwork Center and provided partial financial support for three graduate students. These three graduate students have since all received their PhDs and now hold, respectively, tenure-track faculty positions at the University of Connecticut, the University of Sydney in Australia, and York University in Canada. You can find the recent doctoral dissertation titles and abstracts associated with the Center here.

One of the publications that resulted from the AT&T Industrial Ecology Fellowships, is a top cited paper in the journal, Transportation Research E (see above), entitled, Reverse Supply Chain Management and Electronic Waste Recycling: A Multitiered Network Equilibrium Framework for E-Cycling, which was co-authored with one of my former students, Dr. Fuminori Toyasaki. Elsevier, the publisher of this journal, puts out a ranking on a weekly basis of the top cited papers (published in the journal in the last five years) and the above paper has been on this list for months now.

Interestingly, the New York Times yesterday ran a front page article, In Denmark, Ambitious Plans for Electric Cars, which spoke about the partnership of the Silicon Valley company, Better Place, founded by Mr. Agassi, with Dong Energy, a smart grid company, to install and try to make feasible battery-charging stations in Denmark, specifically, Copenhagen, for charging electric cars. Denmark is providing at least $40,000 in tax writeoffs per electric car purchased and Dong Energy plans on generating a substantial portion of the electricity for the stations through wind energy. Denmark is even offering free parking to owners of electric cars in Copenhagen and I suspect that finding a parking place may not be too difficult since an earlier Times article stated that 50% of the commuters in Copenhagen commute by bicycle!

As yesterday's article noted, it will be interesting to see how many consumers can overcome any psychological barriers to the use of electric cars and being dependent on battery charging stations.

The article, however, neglected to mention the life cycle aspects of electric car batteries and the impact on the environment of their production and ultimate death and disposal.

Nevertheless, Denmark, as well as the above-mentioned companies, should be applauded for their ability to take risks and to innovate in the environmental space.