MBAX 6990 Week 6 Strategy Claims Discussion Post Example

Week 6 Discussion: Testing Each Other's Strategy Claims

Three Claims Hold Up My Brewery Strategy; Tell Me Which Two Collide: A Discussion Post That Invites Classmates to Test a Capstone's Load-Bearing Numbers

My recommendation for Quarry Hill Brewing, the invented New England craft brewery in my capstone, is rinse-water recovery first and a returnable bottle pilot second, expanding the bottle program only if return rates clear a threshold. Three claims hold that recommendation up, and I have numbered them so you can refer to them briefly.

Claim 1, from my strategy section: rinse-water recovery would cut the brewery's total water use by about a quarter, because tank and keg cleaning use roughly a third of its water and most final rinses can be reused.

Claim 2, from my sustainability audit: returnable bottles would substantially cut emissions from glass, the brewery's largest footprint line at about 900 metric tons of CO2e a year, provided each bottle makes many trips. Life cycle studies of drink packaging support the direction of this claim (Amienyo et al., 2013).

Claim 3, from my recommendation: taken together, the two projects would lower the brewery's total water use below today's level.

Here is my request: pick the two claims you think collide, and tell me why. I have a suspicion, but I would rather hear yours first. If you think none of them collide, say so, and tell me which one you find least convincing on its own terms, since a weak claim can sink a recommendation as surely as a contradiction. Hart (1995) argued that pollution prevention and product stewardship can reinforce each other, and my recommendation assumes they do here. If you find that they pull in opposite directions at this brewery, that would change my sequencing.

Reply to Nadia

Nadia, you picked claims 1 and 3, and I think you are right. A bottle washer is a heavy user of hot water, and if the returnable program grew to most of the brewery's bottles, its washer could use more water than rinse recovery saves. Claim 3 only holds if the bottle program stays small or the washer itself reuses its final rinse. I will either limit claim 3 to the pilot stage or add washer water to the financial and environmental sections, so the two projects are counted against each other honestly. Elkington (1997) warned that one dimension of sustainability can quietly undercut another, and this is a clear example. Thank you for catching it before the financial section went any further.

Reply to Brian

Brian, you questioned claim 2, noting that "many trips" is doing a lot of work. Fair point. I do not know Quarry Hill's likely return rate, and published rates for refillable programs vary widely by market. The pilot exists precisely to measure it, but I should state the break-even number of trips at which returnable glass beats single-use glass in my audit, so readers can judge whether the pilot's results clear it. Would you find a sensitivity table, emissions per bottle at five, ten and twenty trips, more convincing than a single figure?

References

Amienyo, D., Gujba, H., Stichnothe, H., & Azapagic, A. (2013). Life cycle environmental impacts of carbonated soft drinks. International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 18(1), 77-92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-012-0459-y

Elkington, J. (1997). Cannibals with forks: The triple bottom line of 21st century business. Capstone.

Hart, S. L. (1995). A natural-resource-based view of the firm. Academy of Management Review, 20(4), 986-1014. https://doi.org/10.2307/258963