 All right, welcome everyone to our SE3x live event. Thanks for joining today. You should already know me. My name's Alexis Bateman. I'm the SE3x course lead and also a research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. And today we're really excited. We have someone that you all know very well already, Dr. Eva Ponce, who is the executive director of our MITx MicroMasters program. But maybe you don't already know that she has quite a few different research lines that are really interesting and also relevant to what you've learned in the course and what you'll be seeing as supply chain professionals. So I asked her to come and chat a little bit about one of those research lines, one of which is circular supply chains for the circular economy, something she's been doing on and off for the last 12 years along with her other research lines, including Omni Channel. And so I'm excited to have her. So I'll let her reintroduce herself, but also give a little bit more background about some of her work. And then we'll go into the session. Excellent. Thank you so much, Alexis. Welcome, welcome everyone to this fourth live event. Yeah, it's my pleasure to be here today. I'm sure with you some of my research projects in reverse logistics and closed loop supply chain. As Alexis mentioned, we have here as a research scientist at MIT, the Center for Transportation and Logistics. We have different hats. One of my hats is to run the MicroMasters program as you all know. And then as a researcher, I'm doing two things. Omni Channel. In Omni Channel, I'm trying to better understand what companies need to do in order to face the growth of e-commerce and also in order to integrate both online and offline channels. In terms of reverse logistics and closed loop supply chain, this is a research line that I started some time ago. As Alexis mentioned more than 12 years ago when I was at that moment in Spain as a professor there at the Technical University of Madrid and I started this research line. I has been collaborating with the government and also with the industry in different research projects implementing a different collection system, take back laws and also network design models for reverse logistics. So I'm happy today to share some of this experience with you and also to answer Alexis questions. I know that Alexis prepared a battery of questions for me. So I'm happy to have this conversation to share some of these experience. Great, thanks so much Eva, thanks for joining us and we're excited to hear about your experience here. I think many of you may have been hearing about the term circular economy or circular supply chains a lot in the last year or so, but I just released a poll about whether you were aware of it. So if you have a chance to fill this out go ahead and fill that poll. And as Eva's put on the screen, we have an agenda today, which is we welcomed you. Now we're gonna talk about circular economy and circular supply chains and then we'll talk about what's next after you finish SC3X and then we'll have time for question to answer. And so if you have questions as we're going through please go ahead and go ahead and put them into the chat and then we can address them as we go along or save them for the end. So feel free to fill out the poll when you have time. And then so let's start with what is the circular economy? So it's a topic that I think maybe everyone has heard a little bit about but can you tell us a little bit about what it is and how it impacts supply chains? Yeah, sure. So circular economy is an alternative to the traditional linear economy. So typically we have been standing and we are very familiar with this linear economy concept that started when we take the product then we make, we produce something and after that we as a consumer, we use that product. So at the end of life of those products we typically dispose these products. So this is kind of the traditional is take the raw material produce, make, use and at the very end after consumption we dispose the products. However, more recently we have been talking more and more about circular economy. What is that? So when we are thinking about circular economy we need to also think more about the resources and to keep these resources in use as long as possible. This is one of the key things when we are talking about circular economy. Also thinking about these resources we are trying to extract the maximum value from them while still these products are in use. And finally, we also want to recover and to regenerate products and materials at the end of each service or product life. And we are going to talk today more about these recovery options. There are many different recovery options and things we can do after dispose a product and we want to talk a bit about that. So is this concept about not just to think about in a linear way and at the end we are all set? No, this is not the case. At the end we really want to reintroduce the use product in the supply chain. Depending on the product, depending on the status of the product depending if we can reuse or we can just recycle it or we can refurbish, there are many different options and we are going to discuss about those options. Also, let me move this here. Let me go a little bit more further into the concept. So in blue we have this traditional linear supply chains from the extraction, the transformation, procurement, make and delivery distributions. So we have on the top the resources we need to use and in each part of this supply chain we are also generating waste. We are generating waste when we are producing material. We are generating waste also and we are polluting when we are transporting the freight and moving the freight from one point to another point. So then we have the use, the use of that products. And at the end of the use, we have the many different recovery options. And this is what we want to focus today in all of the post consumption or recovering options that we have. In these recovering options, there are some principles behind. So we really want to reduce the amount of waste we are generating. And when we thinking circular economy and when we introduce the concept of circular economy we are trying to reduce since the very beginning. I mean with that that we are trying also to reduce the raw material. And we also want to think about which materials are the best to use for a certain product in order to have a better post consumption and in order to better use once we discharge the product in order to better recycle the product or better reuse that product. So reduce is one of the principle that not only apply after we dispose the product this apply since the very beginning even when we are choosing the raw material we want to use for producing that product. Eliminate is one of the last options we have. Elimination is only when we cannot apply any other principle here. I mean, if we can reuse we are going to reuse the product. After consumption we are going to try to reuse the product. These depend on the product as I mean. For instance, if we are talking about a smartphone most likely if we discharge the product and the product is still working we can definitely figure it out a way to reuse that product. Sometimes reuse is not an option. So then we need to think about other possibilities. So sometimes what we need to do is renew is just to maybe fix some pieces or change some parts and try to refurbish, renew and then reintroduce the product as a new product in the supply chain. Great, great. So that's a great intro to kind of get the conversation going. So quick polling results. About 33% said yes, they've heard about it. So that's great. 42% no, but that's okay because you're going to learn more about it today and now you'll be aware of what it means and how to think about it. And then 25% a little bit. So hopefully by the time you walk out of here today you'll know a little bit more that you can take with you. And so let me just fire up our second poll. So let me close that and we will fire up our second poll. So we will... While you are including the second poll Alexis just wanted to highlight that when we are thinking in circular economy supply chains or circular supply chains we are trying to meet two goals. Reduce waste and avoid pollution. And we want to do this by design. So by design since the very beginning we want to include these goals in these supply chains. Awesome. So we just launched the second poll. So if a new cell phone model becomes available with desirable new attributes would you buy it even though your old one still works? So just some feedback on that. So clearly this topic has emerged. So those of you guys whether you're familiar or not it's become a really prominent topic. Can you tell us a little bit about why it has been and then also really why it matters and why our MicroMasters learners should be aware? Definitely. So I'm asking this question about the cell phone what they are doing if they are buying or not and I want to bring here some figures because it's important to be aware about what is happening nowadays with most of the products we are acquiring and buying. So if we have a close look to the cell phone we can see that there are more than 1.5 billion phones sold worldwide. Just in the United States 152 million phones are thrown away each year which is a big amount of cell phones and also the estimation of the EPA is that only 20% of those phones are recycling in the US and at most 30 million phones are recycling. So this is, I really want to see increasing this amount of cell phones that are recycling because at the end and I will show some charts about that there are many different components that we can recover from a cell phone. There is plastic, some of them include glass, metals and metals that are very relevant for other process. So we can recover copper, we can recover platinum, we can recover gold. So there are certain metals that can be recovered from those cell phones. So this is one thing. So my first question is yeah, if a new cell phone hit the market what are you going to do with that? So let's see what they are saying about that. Okay, let's see what everyone came back with. So unfortunately there are some glitches on my site and it is not showing me the results. Oh, there we go. Sorry, I have to go to the main page, forgive me. So if a new cell phone becomes available it says would you step? So maybe I loaded that question because 0% said yes. So I think I added a little additive question. So 36% said no, 7% said it depends on how good the attributes are and it's 57% says it depends on how well my old one works. And so- I love the micro master learners. These are great, yes. But you guys are very critical of when you get a new mobile phone. That's great. And yeah, that's definitely very good. If we ask this question here in the United States I think, and we go on the streets I think we are going to have some yes. I'm going to buy it right away. So my next question here is, yes, this does not apply to our learners which is very good. But for those that definitely say yes I'm going to buy that. My question is okay, once you decide to renew your cell phone what are you going to do with your old one? Right, so let's launch that poll real quick. So what are you going to do with your old one? Okay. Yeah, what to do with the old one because there are many options but the statistics shows that most of them stay in a drawer in our house or we don't do anything with that. And we have many options that from the environmental point of view might be much more friendly with the environment. So this is what I want to explore now. So let's see our learners what they are going to do but I'm going to show also some statistics. This is about a study in Canada. We can see here that 42% of the people in this survey store it away. 24% sold or gave away to friends, to family, charity and only 19%, 19% recycled the cell phone. Then other 10% use other disposal methods or threw it into the garbage, which is so bad because the cell phones contain hazardous materials. So I want to focus a bit more here into the recycling option. Because as I mentioned in a cell phone we have many different components like the plastic, the metals that can be recycling. So for example, in one million phones recycling 16 tons of copper can be recovered. So this is something to definitely take into consideration and there are facilities that is easy to drop out or to dispose the cell phone in a place that we know is going to end in a recycling facility. So let's see what our learners. You'll be happy with our learners' feedback. So, well, 20% said store it away. So that's not the worst. 13% traded in when they get a new mobile one. 40% said they'd give it to someone else. So we have some very kind people in the audience and then 0% throw it away. And then 27% said sell it on a secondary market. This is great. Yes, and to give it to someone else is the best option because if they can still use that this is reuse and as we mentioned, reuse is always our first option. If not, it's just to renew, to refurbish and then recycling and at the very end dispose if we can't do any other thing with that. So that's great. I want also to bring here some figures about the fashion industry. And I'm doing that because this is also an industry that the amount of waste is increasing and has been increased in the last 10, 15 years. The average American is now generating of waste, textile waste is 82 pounds every year which is a big amount of that. If we go to global numbers, we have that the fashion industry produced 92 million tons of waste in 2015. So if we compare from 2000 to 2014 to 2015, the amount of waste in this industry has increased in a 60%, which is really a huge increase. We have that 80 billion of new clothes each year are generated. A three trillion profit globally is what this industry is bringing each year. But if we have a look into the pollution and we have a look about just to the CO2 equivalent emissions, we found that 1.2 billion tons of CO2 equivalent per year are generated by this industry, only by this industry. And also another figure that caught my attention is that the fast fashion clothes on average people are only keeping 35 days. This dramatically changed in comparison with some years ago. Some years ago people, if I think in my grandmother, when they bought a jacket, the jacket was kind of for years. And now we are changing and changing because consumption and also this fast fashion industry that is bringing new products almost every 15 days. So this is very, very tempting. So why this matter? And this is just to answer your question, Alexis. I just want to bring some figures to illustrate the importance and the relevance of this topic nowadays. But the answer to your questions is, first, the waste quantity. We are generating more and more waste. The amount of waste is increasing. Second thing, and this is also important, is that the complexity of the waste is also changing. We are generating a lot of electronic waste. And the e-waste, what happened is that they include a lot of hazardous materials that we need to take care of them. So that's why it's not like when we are disposing the garbage, some organic food is completely different. So we need to take care of this kind of waste. The third thing I want to bring here is that we need to manage these waste. And we need to adapt the logistics systems in order to meet the requirements and the new necessities that we are generating because of these two complexities. The amount, that is one of the complexities that you are studying in a C3X, and the second thing, the complexity by itself of the waste generated. In some countries, it's more, I would say that in some countries, the legislation and regulation are not more important, but definitely there are more regulation about that. And definitely it's a driver in those countries that you need to meet the regulation and you need to meet with the law of waste, with the law and meet the collection target and all of these things. Also the environment, we need to take care about this environment and social responsibility. These are topics that Alexis, she has covered in a C3X in week 10 of a C3X. There are many different types of returns. Commercial returns are those that are more common now because of e-commerce. We have also those returns like bottles or kegs that we can, are reusable. So we can reuse and we can clean and bring them back to the supply chain again. We have a lot of ways that we are generating just because of the transportation industry. We need pallets, we need containers, we need crates, case, packages in order to deliver the freight, also because of the transportation industry. So these are just some of the things I want to highlight here in order to keep your attention about this relevant topic. Great, great, clearly and important in emerging issues. So now on that note, now we want to know and you see it popped up as a new poll, how have your company's been pressured to increase responsibilities around end of life products whether it be packaging or spend products? Have you seen that in your own business or in your own work? And so on that note, can we think a little bit about what our company is doing to address this issue? Can you let us know what are the challenges that the industry is facing and then how they're beginning to address this kind of seeing now that it's such a significant and emerging issue? Yeah, sure. So yeah, let's have a look to some examples from the industry. Let's start with the fast fashion industry because I already brought the figures from that industry. This is example of H&M, one of the fast fashion industry. Headquarters are in Sweden. They started with a project some years ago where they installed green boxes in their stores. They installed in 3,300 stores, the green boxes you can see here, these green boxes, so people that go to that store to buy new clothes can bring the old clothes that they are not going to use anymore and put into this bin. So in 2018, they collected 3,000 tons of garment based on that project. And the target they have is to have more and more bins in almost all of the stores in order to collect 25,000 tons a year by 2020. So 2020 is almost there. So I guess they are continuing with this project in order to meet this target of collecting because the first step when we are talking about waste is to collect the waste. And we need to have a proper system in order to be able to collect the waste we want to have in order to recycling or in order to use, they are in a project now that they want to recycling the fiber making new clothes with recycling fiber. I know also that Zara is investigating a lot into using recycling materials in order to create new clothes. So there is a research line in this fast fashion industry in order to upcycling and downcycling materials and figuring out different uses of these fibers and materials in order to reuse that. Yeah. So there are also other examples that they want to bring here in order to highlight the importance of two things. Collection, one important thing and one challenge in diverse logistics and also the sorting part of the process. So when we collect the things we need to sort these waste in order to treat them in an appropriate way. So the pharma industry, this is a project I did in Spain. We have more than 250 laboratories and they generate more than 2000 tons per year of pharmaceutical waste and the reasons are different in this industry. You know that the regulation in this industry is really strong. Product obsolescence is one of the reasons. Also with the vaccines, the rupture, the break of the cold chain is another reason to just need to discharge that product and also the effective products. So these are the three main reasons to discharge that. The driver in Spain and in Europe is they have directives in Europe, they use directives and there is legislation that regulate how to collect all of these kind of waste. In terms of the process, so if we have a look to the supply chain, this is starting the laboratory, then we have the distribution function, the pharmacy by itself and then the use when the consumer grabbed the medicines and they use that. After that, there is a lot of bins in each pharmacy. You can find a collection bin, a bin that you can go and you can dispose your obsolete medicines or those medicines that you are not going to use anymore. So these are the collection points. There is a system that go to each pharmacy once per week, collect all of the waste that people put into those bins. And then we need to have sorting facilities. Why? We need sorting facilities because typically people put the whole case, they put the cardboard, they put the plastic and the pill, the medicine by itself. So we need a sorting facility to separate the cardboard, the plastic, the package and the pill or the medicine by itself. Typically the medicine cannot be recycling, cannot, we can't do anything with the medicine by itself. We just do the elimination, typically valorization or they just take the power of eliminating that. But we can recover the plastic, we can recover the cardboard and all of the components we need in order to deliver this medicine to the consumers. Yeah, recycling is one thing to go to send the appropriate materials to those recycling facilities and waste valorization for the medicine, the pills by itself. So here is the example of how it works. In the sorting they separate the paper and cardboard, they separate the plastic and the medicine. Here you can see an example of a triage facility and it's a manual process. And this is something that you will see in this industry. When you visit these facilities, you will see a lot of the manual labor people separating in a manual way. There are some automation for batteries. It's very expensive to have sorting facilities automated and it's only justified when the amount of waste is a huge amount of waste. For instance, there is a sorting facility in the Netherlands, in Europe, that is specialized in a certain kind of batteries and they have an automatic process to do that. But this is, as I mentioned, very expensive. Typically, in the sorting facilities, you will see people separating manually the different kind of materials and products. And then once we separate that, we send to the right facility. We send the cardboard to the paper facility. We send the plastic to a plastic facility and then we send the medicine to a completely different facility. Same wise, with the batteries, in Spain, we have 35,000 collection points. And again, the processes start with a good network of bins that people can go and use in order to, once the battery is at the end of their life, they can dispose in the appropriate bin. So collection points are very important and you can find these collection points in the streets. You can find these collection points in the stores. In those every single store that sell batteries, they is mandatory that they need to collect also used batteries. So there is a very important network of collection points that people can use in order to dispose their batteries in Europe in general, in Spain in particular. Yeah, I think it's interesting to think about how to take the product back, right? I think that's one theme that's something that's not very obvious on. It might be great to do these objectives, right? But it's hard to get it back from the consumer. So these collection points are really important. These collection points, at the end, make the life easier also for the citizens because you have the opportunity. And typically, when people are aware about the importance of put the waste in the appropriate bin in order to treat it as an environmentally friendly way, it's very important that this is easy for consumers because if not, if you need to take your car and go to a certain facility far away, it's going to be harder. So yeah, I fully agree. Another important thing that they want to highlight here is related to the network design. So collection is the first point and is very important. We need a transportation system in order to collect that. Once we think about the reverse logistic network, consolidation is super important because now we are moving things from many points to one facility. So it's the opposite problem as the forward logistic. So what we need is consolidation centers in order to gain some economies of scale and reduce the cost of the transportation of this reverse logistic system. In Spain, we are sending these to four different recycling plants, one in the north, southeast, and in the middle, in the center of the country. These are the different regions. Each region we send to a certain recycling facility. But what I want to bring here is one thing that connects with the contents that you have studied in SC2X. In SC2X, you're studying network design models. And network design models are linear programming. A mixed integer linear programming models is what we apply in this project. In this project, we wanted to solve the research question about how many levels of consolidation should they have in order to have a more efficient reverse logistic model? And we consider a local level, regional level of consolidation, and a central level of consolidation. So we define these different tiers in the reverse logistic network. We define here a mixed integer linear programming model in order to decide how many local consolidation centers I need, how many regional, how many central do I need to have in order to make and reduce the logistic cost of moving the used batteries from the bins, from the collection points, to the recycling facilities. So this is a nice example of how to apply techniques that you have been studying for forward logistics also into the reverse logistic problem. Great. And just as a quick note, for those that felt like their companies had been pressured as we're exploring some of these solutions, only 21% said that, yes, their companies have been pressured to increase responsibilities around end-of-life products, whether it be packaging or spent products, 36% no, and then 43% said I'm not sure. So it may be worth the investigation to see if perhaps your company is being held, whether that be through regulation of certain products or consumer awareness or other dimensions, they might actually be driving some initiatives and worth the exploration on that topic. Yeah, totally agree. So more examples of what the industry is doing here in the beer industry. They use many different reusable articles. They use glass bottles. But for restaurants, they use keks. And keks, what happened with keks is that the container by itself is expensive. They need to figure it out. And one of the main challenges in reverse logistics and closed-loop supply chains is the lack of visibility that we have. Once we deliver the beer in the kek to the restaurant, we completely lose the visibility. And then we know that the kek is there, and we need to return that at some point. But the company does not know when this is going to happen. So this lack of visibility generate a lot of problems and also create that they need to buy more keks and have even a big pool of keks in order to don't run out of these containers. But at the end, we have a lot of keks in restaurants that are not used there. So it's important to have more control and more visibility of this item or of these keks, this reusable article in order to have a better way to manage this network at the end. So they need to know where and when, two things. Where the keks is and when it's going to be ready to be returned so they can clean and refill and send it again. So this is something that all of the tools and techniques that you have studied in SC3x about track and trace might be very helpful here. In the example of this industry, they are using RFID in order to track these keks. But they are doing that because, as I said, the cost, the price for each kek is justifying the investment of tracking them using RFID. Right. Great. Actually, that'll be an SC4x. So we'll talk about SC4x in the end. Yeah. Correct. This is an SC4x. Yes, we have this track and trace. So yeah. So one more thing I want to highlight here is because of the growth of e-commerce, one of the consequences is also the growth of commercial returns. There is a nice article. It's about GAP. And they said that people online buy five pints in order to just keep one of these five pints. So they are returning four pints out of five. So the question here is that when we buy through internet, we buy clothes or shoes, one of the first thing consumers are looking into is in the return policy. How is the return policy? How easy can I return that? Because since they can't try the shoes or the clothes, it's important to return that. But what is happening at the end is that we are buying more than we need and we are returning much more than before. So the percentage of these returns, especially for commercial returns and related to e-commerce, is increasing. And we are seeing now 35%, 40% of commercial returns because of e-commerce. There are multiple modes of returns. Companies are playing with different options. You can return directly through UPS, through any of the third-party logistics. You can bring it to a store, a physical store, that more and more become mortars. Traditional become mortars are offering their own stores to return as a return point. There is also an expectation of instant return from consumers. So return in e-commerce is something that we need to definitely take into consideration. But also for traditional become mortars, they need to consider that this is also an opportunity for new sales. So we have, for instance, Walmart is offering their pickup points, but they are also offering these points as a return point. Target is also offering that. And many companies are also offering Amazon has also their own drop-off points, but also they have agreements with traditional become mortars so you can bring your returns to those traditional become mortars. And this at the end, you have the customer there. So that's why if you have a look into the returns policy always to bring the product to the store is free. You don't need to pay for that because also for the company is the opportunity for a new sale. So something just to see some positive things in the new data. Yeah, absolutely. So this has been really interesting to see such a great overview of different industries and what role they're starting to play in this topic. So do you have any points on what the future of the circular economy looks like or how should our MicroMasters learners prepare for this emerging topic? Yeah, I think for our MicroMasters learners I would say that what they want is that all of the tools, techniques, methodologies they are learning for the forward supply chain they can also apply into the reverse logistic problems into closed loop supply chains. So what I want them is to also think about not only in the forward supply chain also think about once we are generating and when we are consuming products at the very end we are generating waste and we need to take care of that waste. And there are different actions that we can do in order to first reduce the waste, second, treat these waste in an appropriate way. So we can reuse, we can extend the life of those products that can be extended. So this is something that definitely I want them to have in mind. Always, and this is kind of an introduction now to SC4X. In SC4X we are going to talk about technology and we are going to talk about new trends. So blockchain is one of the hot technologies now. So there is also some initiatives, Walmart and IBM they have an initiative to use blockchain just to track returns from transactions to returns. So it's an interesting project just in case you are curious about that and you want to learn more about that you can Google it, Walmart and IBM and blockchain in order to move from transactions to returns. This is something, also one thought before ending the presentation is to think about the sharing economy. So now we have different models, Uber, Airbnb. We have many different models that are at the very end what is behind is to share the resource. The bike sharing system is another example of that. So always if we share the resource at the very end is I think we are at least helping a bit not to consuming more and generating more waste at least we are using more and more that resource. So this is the example of the bike sharing system in Paris that was one of the very first. Now in almost all of the main cities we will find some bike sharing system from the supply chain perspective this system has also implications because we need to not only to ensure the number of bikes that we need to have in the spots in order for people to take that we also need to ensure free open spaces for returns. And we have a nice problem here that is called the balancing problem. So we need to balance some points with providing spaces for returns and also to have bikes to offer it for people. So these are also interesting models that need to be understand and need to be people need to tackle with and solve in order to be able to make this doable to offer a system that definitely is helping people to use those bikes or those share resource in general. So my final words here, I want you to better understand the differences between forward and reverse logistics. They are similar, we are solving similar problems but sometimes in reverse logistics the complexity is a bit higher because of the lack of visibility that I mentioned is harder to have forecasting of when the return is coming, where the return is and when it's coming. But also, and with e-commerce we saw that we can identify new opportunities, new opportunities for traditional bike and mortars to offer their traditional stores as a drop off point for returns. And at the very end, I want also you to think not only in the forward flows but also in the reverse flows and its implications. Great, no, that's awesome. Thank you so much, Ebe. That was super interesting. We have a few questions coming through but just real briefly, now that SE3X is ending we wanna know what you're doing next. So I have a quick pull out whether you're gonna take SE4X, whether you're gonna take SE2X, whether you're all done with the courses and you just need to take the CFX or you just took SE3X because it sounded interesting. You're gonna do nothing which I doubt. You're gonna go to Disneyland which I hope so, I wanna come with you and or take a deep breath and think. So just take a minute to fill this out and Ebe has some suggestions on what you could do next. Yeah, so would they want to? Yes, I guess that I know that some of you maybe you are only taking SE3X. I think that most of you are continuing through the SEX courses. So if you have already almost about to finish SE3X our next course is SE4X before taking the comprehensive final exam and earn the MicroMaster Credential. So if you have already complete these three courses I really encourage you to continue to continue to complete the SE4X. In SE4X what we are covering is data management. You will learn how to do queries and you will learn about SQL. You will also learn about machine learning techniques and we will also explain here enterprise resource planning system. How to manage in general what we are teaching in SE4X is how to manage the information flows and how to integrate the information flows in between different organizations and also in the intra organization with ERP system with transportation management systems or warehouse management system. So it's all about data management and also information flows and enterprise system to manage these information flows. So for those that are almost there is one more course is really is very applied as all of our previous courses is very applied very industry oriented. And also we are touching here with new techniques machine learning techniques in order to help you to better understand big data how to analyze big data in supply chain. So, and yeah for those who complete the program the comprehensive final exam is the very last step and this once you have the MicroMaster Credential these open the door to many different opportunities. One opportunity is to apply for the MIT supply chain management blended master degree. This is the picture of the 2019 cohort. You can also apply to many other universities. There are more than 20 universities now that are recognizing the MicroMaster in supply chain management as a pathway for credit. More recently Arizona ASU is offering an online master 100% online on edX in order to get a master degree in supply chain management after completing the MicroMaster in supply chain. So these are many different opportunities. And in any case if you are planning to take AC4X if you are just planning to end here if you plan to take AC2X or whichever course keeping that keeping that with the ACX community of learners because I need to tell you this is the best thing we have in this program. We have an amazing community of ACX learners in many different cities all across the world. These are people that are really motivated and passionate about supply chain management. So take advantage of that keeping touch with us through Facebook or through the MicroMaster portal or just send an email to us. We always are happy to hear from you and receive your feedback. Great. I think it looks it's a little unfortunate that the Boston picture makes everyone look very, very cold. All the other pictures look very warm and comfortable but Boston looks cold. But you'll be happy with the results. 92% of our participants are gonna take AC4X and then the other 8% are gonna take AC2X. So it looks like you guys are stick around with us for the long haul and we're glad for that. So I think we just have about 10 minutes before the end of the hour. We can squeeze in a few questions before we sign off. So if you guys are able to stick around we had quite a few great questions. So Jaitley had some really good, a good question that was echoed along with Chi-Yung which is it's great to think about these circular solutions and how you can take back these products and reprocess that. But can we assume that the pollution or the CO2 generated from those recycling and return logistics would be less than just discarding or throwing away the product? So ensuring that the take back process doesn't overtake the take back. This is a great question and definitely is something that we should quantify. So definitely we are also generating CO2 emissions when we are collecting a waste. Definitely we are generating that. The question is that we need to have the whole picture and we need to quantify all of the emissions from the origin to the destination, also from the destination to the recycling plant and then see also the benefits of recycling or not the product. But yes, should these be in the analysis? My answer is yes, should be there and we are also polluting because of that. The question is that we need to quantify every single part and we also need to see the consequences of not taking care for instance of hazard materials. What happened if we don't take care of that? What happened if we don't collect that? But yes, this is part and we are polluting when we are moving back waste. There are also systems that trying to integrate forward and reverse networks. We have now a nice project with a company here at MIT, the Center for Transportation and Logistics and what they are trying to do is for plastic, they are trying to combine the forward and the reverse supply chain. In order to instead of coming back empty, the tracks trying to collect the returns in the same trip. So we forward the merchandise and then we try to collect the returns in the same track. This is a way to reduce that. However, it's also very complicated because we need to integrate both networks and if the data and all of them and we have control of both things might be easier. But if we do not have control of the returns, as I mentioned is very hard to predict the amount of returns we are going to have in each trip. So it's doable. Yes, it's doable, but it's a complex problem. Some companies are working on that and again, we need to quantify the CO2 emissions with one model, with another model, with different scenarios and compare that. Great, great. So we have a few more great questions. Alisa says, do you have any tips to manage the reverse logistics, returns, redirects across international supply chains? Wow, yes. For international supply chains, yeah. This is tricky because you have different regulations, different legislation in different countries. You also have, yeah, this is a great question. So for global companies, yeah, they need to have global strategies for that. With the additional complexity that they need to meet different regulations in different countries, sometimes what happens is that it's easier to send the ways to those countries that there is no regulation at all. However, there are companies that are very aware about that and they are trying to avoid movements or move ways from one country to another. Unfortunately, there are other situations that people are taking advantage of that and are sending ways to other countries that regulation does not exist. So, yeah. Yeah, I think that's still an open question, right? But if there are localized solutions to where the waste is generated. But this is another example of complexity. These global supply chains, if we think about returns, also the complexity is higher than the traditional supply chains. Yeah. So other, I think we have time, maybe one or two more questions. So, Moham is more of a comment, but what's her take on it, which is Amazon has set in place a policy to get a value for free shipping and they have also free return. So that has a bad effect on people purchasing more and then also enabling easy returns too. What are your thoughts on that? My thoughts on that, this is another great question, free returns. But this is not free, to be honest. It's free because the consumer is not going to pay for the return. So companies are facilitating that. However, there is a cost associated to take back this return. So why companies are doing that? As I mentioned before, online customers, omni-channel customers, one of the things they are looking at is the return policy. At the end, people, some of these consumers are making the decision about buying or not buying the product if returns are easier or not. So from the company perspective, I understand why they are offering the free returns and they are doing that because it's a way also to increase sales. However, there is a cost associated to take back this return. And companies know that, companies are aware about that. And this is one of the reasons for e-commerce, the last mile delivery cost is one of the most important transportation costs are the most relevant part of the transportation cost. They need to take care of that. And also the cost associated to the returns. So something that companies are playing with that, they are offering different returns policy. Yeah, they are playing with that. Some of these companies are not making money on that for sure they are losing money. However, they need to gain market share. So it's a trade-off. Yeah, yeah, no, but it's something good to think about is it becomes increasingly common, especially in the US for free returns. So final, I think we have one last final comment. So Chiang kind of brings a sentiment of, is it better to focus on reducing the waste across the supply chain and innovative product design and operational practices so that we are just avoiding the waste in general and also how consumers can play a role in that. Yes, so from company perspective, yes. When we are talking about circular economy, I would say that the trend I have seen in the last years is to focus more on the design, to put more attention at the very beginning and trying to think in that since the very beginning. So the materials and the raw materials we are going to use are, we are trying to reduce that amount or we are trying to use a material that is easier to reuse at the end or to recycle at the end. So I would say that the trend in the last year is to think about this issue since the very beginning, since the design of the product. This affects the material by itself, but also affect the way we assemble the product and the way we design the product because the easier we do that, sometimes we come designing an easier way to recover the relevant components and parts that we need to recover for let's say a washing machine or a fridge or this kind of product. So design matters in terms of assembly and disassembly and also the material by itself. So I would say yes and this help a lot to reduce the amount of material that we need for the product and to reuse more and more the final product at the very end. From consumer, what can we do? As a consumer, we always have the choice to buy those products that are environmental friendly. Typically these products are more expensive than the others or just to be aware about that is kind of when we go to the supermarket and we read about the amount of sugar that it contains certain products. We can also be aware about which are the materials. When I buy this product, can I extend the life of that product? Can I have more uses for that product? So awareness from the consumer perspective, I think is the thing that can help here more to contribute to that. Great, thank you so much Eva, that was so interesting. And first, everyone, thank you guys so much for joining. So at the first, you guys now are informed consumers. So I hope that you take some of these learnings back to your daily life. And beyond that, hopefully you can take some of the learnings as well to your professional life as well. So I think we had a great session. Thank you Eva so much for these great insights. And don't forget, the final exam is open. The last hurdle in SE3x, you have until the next Wednesday at 1500 UTC. Make sure to get it done. And thank you guys for joining today. Thank you so much. Thank you.