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Earth Day: Conference addresses sustainability options for supply chain companies

April 21, 2014

Companies including Kendall Electric , Office Depot Max , Nichols and HTC Global Services set up booths around the conference room to showcase their environmentally-friendly products, services and ideas.

The conference also included several speakers and presentations aimed toward sustainable purchasing, supplies and buildings.

Joanne Cebelak , account manager at Kendall Electric , said the conference was a way for companies to collaborate and make the community more sustainable and energy-efficient.

She said an environmental goal of Kendall Electric is to eliminate additional trash and waste in landfills. The company, a regional wholesale distributor of electrical products such as LED lights, recycles office paper, cardboard, metal scraps, shrink wrap and more.

“We try to help (our customers) become more energy efficient by becoming a long-term sustainable company,” Cebelak said. “All of our packaging is sustainable as much as we possibly can. We don’t have nice pretty boxes with our Kendall logo. We reuse what comes in from our vendors.”

Ravi Shankar , manager and business developer of HTC Global Services, also made an appearance at the conference.

Shankar said within the company’s Kuali Foundation is OLE , or open library environment, in which HTC Global Services digitizes materials for library users to reduce the use of paper printing.

“When you go to a library, you are photocopying so many times when you are doing research,” Shankar said. “Once you digitize it, it is available online so you don’t have to print (your research).”

John Waldon from Von Andel Research Institute is the maintenance, repair and operations buyer of the company. He said the conference brought him new insight to sustainability.

“I learned a few things that we should probably try to be doing that we are not,” Waldon said.

Waldon said he was most interested in supply chain management professor Steve Melnyk’s presentation because he discussed the starting of the sustainability process and the measuring of metrics’.

“We don’t measure metrics like they have set up here at MSU,” Waldon said. He said most companies are striving to become more environmentally friendly which is why a greener supply chain is important.

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