Environmental Product Chain Management
Preface
In recent years, a number of Danish enterprises have established environmental cooperation under which different enterprises in a product chain each contribute to an improvement of the overall environmental performance of the final product. Environmental cooperation in the product chain in many cases can be seen as an extension of the environmental management system of the individual enterprises.
The Environmental Council for Cleaner Products in 2000-2001 initiated a collection of experience from the environmental cooperation in 25 product chains. This collection of experience was to elucidate the concrete cooperation between suppliers, enterprises and purchasers, to go through tools and to report on opportunities and barriers for environmental efforts in the entire product chain. The studies were made in two stages, the latter focusing more on perspectives relating to eco-labels /environmental product declarations and environmental cooperation across borders.
To allow for future exploitation of Danish experience with environmental cooperation in product chains, the present report aims to communicate experience from the 25 environmental product chain reports in a uniform and clear manner. The description of each example of product chain cooperation is based on a template with the following headlines:
 | Start phase |
| Product chain |
| Environmental cooperation |
| Environmental achievements |
| Perspectives |
It should be noted that additional information has been collected, neither from enterprises participating nor from consultants behind the individual reports. As the underlying reports (to a certain extent) have different structure, extent and contents, it has not been possible to elucidate all issues in the same detail for all examples of environmental cooperation. The underlying reports may be found in full (in Danish only) on the website of the Danish Environmental Protection Agency www.mst.dk under "publications".
For product chains where a real cooperation among several players is clear, it has been illustrated with a diagram of the following type:
This report has been made by Birgitte Ettrup and Bjørn Bauer, PlanMiljø, spring 2002.