Report_Team#1. Part_1.

I. Introduction and the main concept

XX century is the time of great progress in science, particularly in the production technologies. As we know it is time when the second scientific and technical revolution took place. This leap was caused by many events and social processes, such as Second World War, following it Cold War and the development and spreading of democracy.

The fact that humanity realized the lack of resources and our intolerable attitude to planet is not illogic.

Thus mankind faced the problem of economical usage of resources and optimization of production process. Logistical aspect of this problem is not new, but due to the world trend to integration the concern of shipping, storing and distribution became actual and universally common. That is why logistics and particularly sustainability in it are highly important issues to be analyzed.

To understand what sustainability in logistics is we’d like to ascertain what sustainability is in general. We developed the common scheme of social system functioning in the frames of biosphere (pic.1.), where “G” stands for government, “S” – for consumer society and “B” – for business, enterprise including three main parts and relations between them: “ext” means extracting resources, “man” means manufacturing of goods, “dis” – distribution of them.

Pic.1. Scheme of social system’s subjects interconnection in biosphere

This generalized scheme illustrates activity of social systems, so you can see two-way flows of goods, money, resources and other. By creating this scheme we want to demonstrate the limitation of everything inside biosphere by its borders. So from this scheme we can conclude the following general definition of sustainability:

“Sustainability is the state of social system, whose subjects continue adequately operating in conditions of optimization of biosphere resources usage and reproduction of them”.

This definition is not far from the classic one: “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 11th of December, 1987). In other words, sustainability means the durable maintenance of balance between parts of something. Thereupon we can develop the definition of sustainability in logistics:

“Sustainability in logistics means such a state and organisation of logistical system that keeps all its parts in active form letting the whole enterprise develop in conditions of biosphere resources reproduction and optimization of their usage”.

And here you can see the definition all Russian teams have developed (and anyway we think that all aspects of this concept are presented in it):

“Sustainability in logistics is such a state of enterprise logistical system which affords to keep preservation of the systematic control and management of material, financial and informational flows of the company in conditions of maintenance of general balance between different spheres of society and environment”.