Purpose:
The purpose of this assessment is to critically evaluate theories, frameworks and principles, apply circular economy and sustainable logistics and supply chain theories/frameworks/principles to existing/imaginary logistics systems and critique current circular and/or sustainable logistics policies, practices and terminology.
Details:
For this assessment you will be required to:
critically analyse and evaluate theories, frameworks and principles relating to circular and sustainable logistics and supply chains
deploy originality in the application of circular and sustainable theories, frameworks and principles to evaluate associated logistics and supply chain networks
demonstrate a critical awareness of current circular and sustainable logistics and supply chain policies, practices and terminology.
Instructions:
Write an essay to describe and critically evaluate an existing or imaginary logistics system, apply circular economy (CE) and sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) theories/frameworks/principles to it and then critique current or potential circular and sustainable logistics policies, practices and/or terminology and critique the theories used.
You can imagine this paper as containing four parts:
Provide a description of a logistics system of a specific organisation (or a detailed description of an imagined one).
Apply theories/frameworks/principles of circular and sustainable logistics (as covered in the course and potentially extended by your own research), such as Carter and Rogers’ Facets model of SSCM (Carter and Rogers, 2008), the Planetary Boundaries framework (Steffen et al. 2015), the Waste Hierarchy (Gharfalkar et al. 2015), Life Cycle Analysis (Kucukvar et al. 2014) (or whichever one you are interested in from the module), etc.
Use these theories/frameworks/principles to critique the logistics system you have described.
Critique the theories/frameworks/principles you have used.
This structure would work out to approximately 400 words each section, plus references. However, this is not a strict requirement and you can either make each section longer or shorter within the total word count or adopt a different structure if it makes more sense to you. Diagrams/figures/tables can be added and do not count towards the word count. Using a real organisation and basing your description on good quality research into its actual logistics system is likely to be a less risky strategy than trying to make one up. However, if a strong, plausible, detailed description of an imagined logistics system can be given, then this will not suffer. Please just consider that such an imagined logistics system would need to be of a level of detail equivalent to that of a real one.
References
Carter, C. R. and Rogers, D. S., (2008). A framework of sustainable supply chain management: moving toward new theory. International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 38(5), pp. 360–387. doi.org/10.1108/09600030810882816.
Gharfalkar, M., Court, R., Campbell, C., Ali, Z. and Hillier, G., (2015). Analysis of waste hierarchy in the European waste directive 2008/98/EC. Waste Management, 39, pp. 305–313.
Kucukvar, M., Egilmez, G. and Tatari, O., (2014). Evaluating environmental impacts of alternative construction waste management approaches using supply-chain-linked life-cycle analysis. Waste Management & Research, 32(6), pp. 500–508.
Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E. M., … and Sörlin, S., (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223), 1259855.
