Investigation of Green Criteria With Clustering Analysis in Green Supplier Selection

Green supplier selection has a crucial importance for businesses. In the past, the selection of suppliers was solely based on conventional criteria such as cost, quality, and flexibility whereas expectations of businesses transformed in today's world on grounds of raised environmental awareness, public pressure, and regulations. Alternatives called green suppliers sensitive to the environment, preserving the ecological balance, managing wastes, and preventing pollution increased in value. This study analyzes practices on the selection of green suppliers. The articles between 2014 and 2021 were analyzed from the perspective of green criteria. The green criteria in the 50 articles determined are divided into 28 groups. With the k-means algorithm, these criteria groups are divided into four clusters, which was aimed to analyze the usage frequency of green criteria. This study is intended to contribute to green supplier selection practices in academia and industry in the future.

Studying the quenching resulted from the formation of an association complex between olsalazine or sulfasalazine with acriflavine

We report the detection and quantification of important ulcerative colitis drugs olsalazine (OLS) and sulfasalazine (SUL) by the spectrofluorometric method. The proposed method was optimized and validated by using the quenching effect on the acriflavine fluorescence. The method was applied on the detection and quantification of OLS and SUL under optimized conditions showing the calibration curves were linear (range: 1.0–10.0 µg ml −1 ), with correlation coefficients R 2 of 0.9999 for both drugs. The limits of detection (LOD) and quantification (LOQ) were 53 and 104 ng ml −1 for the OLS and 160 and 315 ng ml −1 for the SUL. This method permitted the analysis of OLS and SUL in their pure and pharmaceutical forms. The proposed spectrofluorimetric method was also evaluated against ‘green’ criteria and all the experimental results make it an eco-friendly and safe method for the detection of OLS and SUL.

When is Green Really Green? A Latvian Case Study on Updating of Food Supply Green Public Procurement

Green public procurement (GPP) is an important tool and is used to reduce adverse environmental impacts caused by food production. To have a more detailed look at the application of GPP in Latvia, the authors screened 97 public tenders for supply of food products, documenting the choice of the green criteria. Only 15 % of the screened tender documents corresponded to the national GPP requirements. Only 4 % of the tender documents gave higher priority exclusively for organic products compared to products within national quality schemes or integrated pest management agriculture. The authors compared these findings with the opinions of environmental experts, GPP guidelines by the European Commission, and experience from other countries. The authors conclude that 1) self-reporting is not an appropriate method to measure the implementation level of GPP, and 2) having a large number of criteria without clear goals can lead to using the easiest, but least environmentally beneficial options, and 3) for some tenders complying with national GPP, the environmental benefits may be unclear.

An environmentally sustainable plasticizer toughened polylactide

Cardanol, derived from renewable resources, exhibits good plasticizing efficiency for PLA, meeting “double green” criteria.