Introduction
In 2006, the powerful Oscar-winning environmental documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was released about former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s campaign to educate society about global warming. The film was a major catalyst for environmental awareness, placing a new level of environmental responsibility on the agenda for governments, organisations and everyday people around the world.
Almost twenty years later, progress has been made to improve our collective approach to environmental sustainability; however, there is still a way to go. It is a complicated endeavour with diverse perspectives and capabilities to implement the requirements. That progress has included the signing of the United Nations’ Paris Agreement by 196 countries in 2015, a treaty that aims to limit the increase in the global average temperature to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels by reducing carbon emissions. So far, the temperature has increased by 1.1°C and under current emission reduction policies, it is predicted that the world will experience global warming by the end of the century of 2.5 to 3.0°C, which some scientists have predicted would have serious effects on our climate, sea levels and the wellbeing of life on earth.
Global taskforces have since developed ways to translate these aims into frameworks that governments and organising bodies can adopt and turn into legislation and regulations, and this is now filtering into the governance and policies of large organisations around the world. In the West, there are new requirements for environmental impact assessment. The ISO14064-1 standard of environmental impact reporting is now being implemented across supply chains, requiring large corporations to follow a standard to report their environmental impacts. Many other initiatives are also underway; one example is that Amazon and 500 other companies have committed to the Climate Pledge of achieving carbon neutrality by 2040. Amazon expects its highest-emitting suppliers to provide a decarbonisation plan for their operations and says it will prioritise its business accordingly. Another in Kordz’ founding country of Australia, is that the federal government has launched the Environmentally Sustainable Procurement Policy, which aims to drive positive change towards a net zero circular economy through its procurement of categories that include fittings, equipment, and information and communication technology (ICT) goods. These requirements are ultimately filtering down into our day to day lives and they are changing the expectations of our customers and the way we do business as systems integrators.
Kordz has long placed aspects of sustainable thinking at the heart of its product development; however, it has also taken measures to reduce its impact more recently, focusing initially on shortening the global supply chain through its purchasing and distribution strategies and lately on minimising waste via better packaging and production methodologies. So, in this article series, we would like to help our community understand the complex issues at hand and more importantly, what Kordz is doing to make it easier for you and your customers to reduce environmental impact with our products.
The Challenges of Our Legacy Global Supply Chain
Our global supply chain has evolved somewhat organically over thousands of years from subsistence to tribes trading on foot, to merchants trading across continents by sea, to the fast-paced world of global trade and e-Commerce we experience today. In recent decades, as our world has come to understand the environmental impact of today’s supply chain, particularly the heavy use of primary resources and fossil fuels, and the propensity to throw unwanted materials into landfill – it has recognised the unsustainable nature of current practices and the need to take a new approach. The difficulty has been in determining how to restructure this complex supply chain, on which our world and growing population is highly dependent day to day, and make alternatives easier to adopt. This is no mean feat, affected by many complex factors including history, geography, the relative wealth of nations across the first and third worlds and costs of labour. It is going to take effort and cooperation to address the issues and will be one of the great challenges of our collective lifetimes. Governments have explored many approaches, including carbon taxes, shifting to renewable energy, developing new technologies and materials that improve efficiencies, recovery and reuse of waste, and recycling programs for waste disposal. These are all positive steps forward, and yet we have more to do creating new pathways that make it easier for everyone to do better.
Understanding the Environmental Footprint of a Connectivity Product
To begin, it is important to understand the environmental impact of a connectivity product, and this requires understanding its relationship with the global supply chain. Let’s take the example of a patch cord. A typical network patch cord consists of two RJ45 connectors, a length of cable, other ancillary components and packaging materials. And so, to manufacture a patch cord, a factory must purchase the components from other factories, or manufacture them itself from raw materials. Such raw materials must all be sourced from nature, such as raw copper ore mined in Chile or crude oil pumped from the ground in Saudi Arabia. These raw materials are transported to a processing plant closer to their end destination to be refined into pure materials suitable for manufacturing. These are purchased and used by Kordz to create components of finished products, such as contacts, plug housings, packaging, wire etcetera, which are then fed to our assembly lines where they are used to create finished products, such as a patch cord. Every aspect of the sourcing, creation and delivery of this product – and every product – has an environmental impact. Let’s take a look at copper, as one key ingredient.
Copper is just one component in the Bill of Materials of our products and this depiction is not exhaustive of the impacts involved in that one component. Additionally, we can include the many different polymers used to make cable jackets, the gases such as nitrogen injected during the manufacturing process, the various packaging materials, additional freight incurred during certification processes, as well as the many machines we have on the production line to make and certify these products and more. So, you can see, every humble connectivity product comes with a vibrant international passport of logistics, resources and energy-consuming steps required to deliver it to your business. And this is just an overview of connectivity products. When you think about it, every product we consume in every aspect of our daily lives has a story to tell through its footprint and makes on impact on our planet.
With this in mind, at Kordz we believe it is important to take a holistic approach to manufacturing. The quality and performance of our products are paramount; yet in addition to seeking more environmentally friendly inputs and supply chain efficiencies to source, create and deliver our products, we view their utility for our customers as an important consideration in our concept development and engineering, including aspects like efficient installation, waste reduction and reliability – because failed products and service calls, for example, also add unnecessary negative impact to our environment.
In the next part of this article series, we will share more about how Kordz is approaching environmental sustainability, the steps we’re taking and what you as a systems integrator can do to reduce your environmental footprint.
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