What's in Your Paper? Organizational Fiber Consumption and the Purchasing Decisions that Drive it
Pennsylvania State University
Description
Institutions of higher education (HEI) today often pursue sustainability in a holistic manner, integrating sustainability into their day to day operations as well as their long-term strategic plans. One challenge that HEIs have faced as attention to sustainability has grown is how to best assess the performance of sustainability initiatives. From an operational perspective, measuring the impact of sustainability practices is necessary for assessing the efficacy of those practices and for identifying opportunities for improvement. Sustainability metrics are also an effective tool for communicating organizational values to interested stakeholders.
One area in which sustainability metrics are not yet well-developed is procurement. Institutional purchasing is crucial to the overall sustainability performance of HEIs. Despite this, the metrics used to evaluate and report sustainability performance of procurement outcomes often focus on the overall reduction of purchased materials and the acquisition of products carrying third-party environmental certifications. While such metrics are useful for encouraging better purchasing decisions, they have limited utility for assessing the environmental impact of those decisions.
For many universities, paper products are a core area of minor procurement expenditures. Paper, or rather the fiber it is composed of, is a worthwhile area to focus sustainability efforts due to the environmental burdens associated with its production. Even responsibly sourced paper products can have sizeable impacts on environmental indicators. Those impacts can also differ significantly between products that are effectively identical in form and function. As such, reliance on third-party certifications (e.g., FSC, SFI) is an inadequate method for improving sustainability performance in this procurement area. In order to effectively manage sustainability of paper consumption, universities must analyze their own fiber consumption patterns.
This research consisted of two related but distinct projects, each investigating different aspects of organizational fiber consumption. The first part of the research is a descriptive study offering a critical evaluation of sustainability metrics related to fiber consumption and corporate attempts at quantifying environmental impacts in the form of footprint-type measures. The second part of the research was rooted in behavioral science and investigated human factors that influence fiber consumption in organizations. The study sought to explain the roles of behavioral attitudes and social norms in employee purchasing decisions. Specifically, Penn State employees who purchased select paper products in the prior year were surveyed to measure environmental concern, attitudes and norms toward green purchasing, task discretion, and green purchasing intention. Secondary purchasing data was obtained from the Department of Purchasing Services and linked to survey responses to measure behavioral outcomes.
In the areas of sustainability reporting and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices, the concept of a forest footprint metric has not yet been addressed in the scientific literature. As such, this study offers the first critical examination of these metrics and presents recommendations for advancing the concept. Within the sustainable supply chain management and procurement fields of study, relatively little research has been published on the impact of minor procurement on the sustainability performance of organizations. Likewise, very little research has been dedicated to the purchasing decisions of staff level employees, with the bulk instead focused on senior level organizational buyers and supply managers. This research highlights the roles of administrative support employees and minor procurement decisions in sustainable supply chain management strategies of large organizations.