Understanding green production: A pilot study to explore the production centred factors impacting the development of green producers

随着对绿色产品需求的持续增长，创造和发展新业务的大量机会正在出现。这一新的生产者浪潮代表了英国公司的重要环境和经济机遇。然而，可能是我们现有的生产操作知识不足以支持绿色生产商的快速增长，英国将缓慢地从这些新的商业机会中获益。与许多传统制造商相比，在这里，材料来源、接近市场、生产控制和就业道德等因素是品牌识别和产品差异化的关键。此外，这种价值观的变化也挑战了传统的生产操作设计和管理思维。例如，通过将生产外包给中国来降低成本可能是一种诅咒。这让我们不禁要问：“哪些以生产为中心的问题会影响英国绿色制造商的发展？”这是主流运筹学社区中一个相对未被探索的话题，由于我们不确定我们可能会遇到什么，我们提出这个试点研究，以更好地理解这些问题，并为未来的工作奠定基础。

As demand continues to rise for green products substantial opportunities are now emerging for the creation and development of new businesses. This new wave of producers represents both an important environmental and economic opportunity for UK Plc. However, it may be that our existing knowledge of production operations is inadequate to support the rapid growth of green producers, and that the UK will be slow to reap the benefits of these new business opportunities. In contrast to many traditional manufacturers, here, factors such as the sources of materials, proximity to markets, control over production, and ethics of employment, are key to brand identity and product differentiation. Moreover, this change in values also challenges conventional thinking on production operations design and management. For example it may be an anathema to seek cost reductions by outsourcing production to China. This has led us to question 'what are the production centred issues that can impact the growth of UK based green manufacturers?' This is a relatively unexplored topic within the mainstream operations research community and, as we are unsure of what we may encounter, we propose this pilot study to better understand these issues and form a foundation for future work.