Modeling the Value Chain Sustainability of Forest Resource-Based Products

A modern sustainable economy has highly interconnected industries which optimally use both renewable and non-renewable resources for sustainable production and consumption of goods and services. Industrial ecology-based development can lead to a sustainable co-existence of economy, technology and natural environment. However, this requires transformative, integrative, life cycle oriented framework and interdisciplinary approaches to shift our human actions and behaviors towards sustaining our current and future generations development. Service and manufacturing industries are evolving to become environmentally responsible, bio-based, and capitalizing information and communication technologies (ICTs) to develop industrial ecology-modeled supply (value) chains. Information technology has negatively affected the forest based industries such as lesser consumption of newsprint and office papers. This negative impact can also stimulate the pulp and paper industry to refurbish its operations and produce highly value added products. US forest industry can find ways to combine wood resources with ICT in new innovative ways such as supporting the production of bioproducts and biofuels. These newly found business opportunities can intensify the ongoing restructuring of the forest sector and make this industry viable in the face of global challenges. ICT is considered significant enabler in the creation of value chain networks. The goal of this project is to develop an ICT enabled framework and conceptual design model for creating sustainable supply chains of forest-based bio-products. ICTs such as electronic data interchange (EDI) and ?cyberinfrastructure? can help in increasing the productivity and viability of an industrial sector. EDI-based model is also applicable to the current challenging pursuit of broadening and deepening of life cycle assessment (LCA) method to account economic, social and other dimensions of sustainability. EDI-based system can support secure exchange of relevant information of trading companies within a supply chain and thus enables comprehensive and reliable life cycle sustainability assessment of products and services. Through this novel and robust approach, information regarding energy efficiency, economic, socio-economic and environmental performance, as well as other sustainability issues can be exchanged within the supply chain networks. Thus, this work can be the basis in developing a "cyberinfrastructure" enabling framework to derive novel scientific theories and knowledge.