Making Supply Chains Sexy to Gen Z with Program Director Jack Buffington

Jack Buffington is a professor of the practice at the Daniels College of Business and University College at the University of Denver. His research is focused on the development of a 21st-century supply chain and the closed-loop supply chain system.

He has held various executive- and managerial-level positions in industry and consulting in supply chain, operations, information technology and finance, and he has served on many supply chain association boards.

In 2010, he completed a PhD specializing in supply chain, innovation and material science at the Lulea University of Technology in Lulea, Sweden, and was a post-doctoral researcher at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

After getting his PhD in Sweden, the most sustainable country in the world, Jack Buffington realized that the issues they face are the same as he had faced back in America running the world's largest brewery. Supply chains were built to provide people with products, but they had not been created in order to do that while ALSO creating balance in the environment.

Supply chains of the future need to be able to do both. This interview with Jack Buffington will share his thoughts on supply chains and how the environment and economy can co-exist. 

What’s something you’re excited about?

Closed loop systems! The challenge, though, is that you have to design them from the beginning and plastic was not designed for reuse. We can do recycling campaigns and the like, but the most that does is mitigate the problem.

And the biggest challenge?

When we use the term plastic, we use it as if it's “aluminum”, but aluminum is really just one material whereas plastic is thousands of different materials and how we recycle a PVC is much different than how we would recycle a PET.

Today, our supply chains are long tail supply chains, which means we're shipping products long distances. The problem with plastic as a waste material, is that once you ship it, you've just lost economic potential for solving the problem.

My research has focused on community-based supply chains. You look at the plastic waste at the point WHERE it's consumed and convert it into something useful THERE before you ship it. Now all of a sudden, you have something of value in these communities that can lead to economic growth, which is particularly important in the developing world.

You're basically turning a waste product into a natural resource for places that don't have natural resources. What you've done is enable the supply chain to solve the problem of converting it into a resource before it's waste. If you try to ship waste in a supply chain system, there's no way economically to make that viable. So that's the true innovation in our system.

What are some practical applications for this?

Advanced Recycling Technology, or “chemical recycling”, is a super touchy subject - activists hate it and industry loves it.  What do you think?

See video for full details: Acknowledges valid issues, offers alternative solutions to the particularly objectionable points, more science, offers preference for technologies that can scale safely into communities and points to the false dichotomy of needing to focus on the economy or on the environment - you focus ON the economy BY focusing on the environment

What keeps you up at night?

Maybe this is going to be a little controversial, but it’s the complacency of today's recycling programs - which very much demonstrate “the good is the enemy of great” saying. Consumers have your little green bins, you throw your recycling in the green bin, you feel good about it and feel as if that's all that needs to been done. Or, a consumer product company gets rid of their straws and then we feel like it's fait accompli.

That's just incremental remediation. We need disruptive innovation at this point, we need game changers.

Now, what really excites me is that my space (supply chain) actually has the opportunity to solve the problem - because we're the guys who caused the problem in the first place. The same problem solving techniques that caused the problem can solve the problem. We have to say to supply chain companies, “You're tasked with NOT creating this false narrative of needing to choose between the economy and the environment.”

So supply chain is going to save the planet, but how do we make supply chain sexy to GenZ since they’re the ones who are going to have to live in this world we’ve created for them?

Yeah, I love this question. What I love about this generation is that they have high principals. They look at what's happening in the world and they want to do something about it. What's great about the field of supply chain is that if we do one thing well, it's that we solve problems - as long as we're focused on the right problem.

When I explain to them that supply chain means problem solving and they connect the dots, then I say, “Okay, now think about what matters to you - social justice issues and the environment. Now think about how supply chains can solve those problems”.

They get super excited. I think that's what these guys WANT to do. They want to make a good living, but they want to make a difference on the planet at the same time.

And if there's any field that ties those two together, it’s the field of supply chain.