Here with us today we have Paul Ligon, Senior Director of Business Development and Strategy for Upstream, a division of Waste Management. He’ll be speaking at the Opportunity Green conference on the “Effective Strategies for Waste” panel.
Paul, could you tell us a little about Upstream and what you do?
Upstream is North America’s leading provider of “resource management” services, or customized integrated solutions that help businesses turn their waste streams into value added resource streams. Nearly 300 Upstream employees work at over 100 business locations and/or supply chains across North America.
What is the importance of integrated resource management to a firm?
Resource management provides a practical way for businesses to achieve their sustainability goals — particularly the economic and environmental aspects of those goals. In many respects, RM is simply an extension of other efficiency measures that businesses undertake in the normal course of their operations – it just involves looking at the business value chain in a way that accounts more completely for material and resource usage.
I suppose that while optimizing a company’s internal operations can be a challenge in itself, working to improve how supply chain partners interact is an even bigger challenge. How do you see it?
Supply chain solutions can represent a major challenge for businesses addressing sustainability, particularly when supply chain partners have conflicting incentives. For example, many business contracts are volume rather than value based, which can produce conflicting incentives. Aligning business and supplier financial incentives is key to success of many sustainability initiatives, but often is a major challenge as solutions such as resource management — which generally involves gain sharing with suppliers who identify and implement innovative resource efficiency solutions — do not necessarily fit neatly in a company’s buying behavior as it relates to waste management.