ACEM publishes a white paper on "plastics reduction" together with Unilever and Alibaba

On November 6, 2020, Unilever, together with Antai College of Economics & Management (ACEM) and Alibaba, held a launch ceremony of the latest sustainable project "Waste Free World" at Unilever headquarters. At the same time, the sustainable development communication meeting was also held at Unilever's stand in the CIIE. As ACEM is a co-author of the white paper on plastics reduction in this launch ceremony, Dean Chen Fangruo of ACEM attended the conference and delivered a speech.

This white paper project was prepared, organized and arranged by the MBA Dragon Project team of ACEM. The Dragon Project adheres to rigorous and cutting-edge business theories, helps enterprises to solve short-term practical problems, provides valuable services, and enables full-time MBA program students to use their leadership, teamwork and problem-solving ability in a real business environment. This white paper project was jointly initiated and borne by Unilever and ACEM. (See the attachment for the details of the white paper)

As the final deliverable of the project was a white paper, the CLGO project team invited the professor Zhu Qinghua of ACEM as the special instructor for the project. Professor Zhu Qinghua is a distinguished professor of ACEM, and a winner of National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in 2010. She focuses on research of green supply chain management, corporate social responsibility and remanufacturing management. As the leader, she has undertaken 8 national projects and 9 provincial and ministerial projects, such as National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, 973 project and key projects of National Natural Science Foundation of China, as well as a series of international cooperation and government projects. In 2007 and 2013, the National Natural Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars and general projects were evaluated as "premium" successively, and the results were included in the 2007 Annual Report of NSFC.

This Dragon Project team is composed of Glenn Budhi Santoso, Yu Wenqing and Yang Runlu from the full-time MBA class of ACEM and classmate Zhang Yifan from Sino-US Global Logistics Institute. As Glenn mainly focused on research of green supply chain in his past work experience and was experienced in project management, he was elected as the leader of the project team. At the beginning of the project, Robin Zhang (Procurement Director, North Asia, Unilever) and Annie Tao (Procurement Manager) were invited to ACEM, to have a deep communication with all members of the project team. They shared Unilever's social responsibility vision, effort and achievement in the past decade, and were then clear about the goal to achieve in this project. After that, the project team started to write the white paper. They made overall planning for the progress of the whole project, and started the path of writing the white paper, which lasted from the end of July to the beginning of November.

Finally, under the coordination of various parties, the final version of the white paper was finalized in four months. The white paper written should be reviewed by Unilever R&D, Legal and Public Affairs departments and relevant principals of Alibaba before it could be finalized. Therefore, in order to better complete this project, the team members conducted coordination and internal & external communication time after time during the project, to ensure that the final draft can be completed smoothly on time. Fortunately, the project team was finally able to deliver the white paper on schedule with everyone's strength and effort.

Armstrong said, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” What the project team has done may be just the writing, but we believe that a thousand miles of travel will start with the first step. In the future, there will be more opportunities to promote larger projects with the world's top 500 companies like Unilever. The White Paper on Sustainable Development of Plastics written by the project team provides detailed analysis on the issues of waste plastics. Meanwhile, it also advocates to enhance public awareness of environmental protection and promote circular economy from the perspective of digital empowerment, providing a strong endorsement for the promotion of this “Waste Free World” project. In the future, let's look forward to more Dragon projects!