Tez özetleri Astronomi ve Uzay Bilimleri Anabilim Dalı

Green Supply Chain Management and an Application

The Kyoto Protocol, which was signed in 1997 and came into force in early 2005, is the only international framework that provides to strive against global warming and climate change issues. The countries who have signed this protocol, commit to reducing the emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases (GHG) or to have rights through emission trades.

Afterward the stage legislation that endorse Turkey's participation into the Kyoto Protocol was ratified and adopted a law code by the General Assembly of Parliament on February 5, 2009; companies have started to evaluate new legislations about the greenhouse gas reduction and arranged their processes towards these arrangements. They endeavor to find out their GHG emissions level and their sources first and develop systems to monitor emissions with regards to “You can manage what you can measure” approach.

Considering that society will be more “green conscious” in the new future, companies should create value both customer and environment. This is important to retain their competitiveness and create new competitive advantages in the international markets. To create value they should employ new strategic applications like determinig carbon level that taking environmental effects into account.

Unfortunately neither in literature nor in application there are sufficient resourced about this issue which has been recently rising in Turkey. In that sense, with an application in this dissertation it is aimed to open this discussion.

In this study, facility location decision problem, that is one of the main supply chain issues, was investigated by minimizing CO₂ emissions of a company’s distribution network and thus the green supply chain management which is a new concept for Turkey was discussed. In the first part of the application, clustering analysis was conducted using Fuzzy C-Means and Gustafson-Kessel algorithms. In the next part, center of gravity method was adapted to emission problem calling it emission-based center of gravity method. It is applied to determine the facility locations to minimize CO₂ emissions sourced from transportations between plants and customers.