Environmental sustainability in supply chains

Supply chains as a lever for sustainability ?

Supply chains can act as effective mechanisms for raising environmental and social standards but can be very blunt instruments. While supply chain action can bring sustainability gains, it can also have unintended negative consequences and cause considerable resentment at the mismatch between costs and benefits along the chain. This article looks at how and why supply chains are being used to i...

Measuring the Sustainability of Global Supply Chains

Researchers and practitioners alike have become increasingly interested in the environmental performance of global supply chains. Does improving the environmental performance of a single link of a supply chain improve the entire chain’s sustainability — that is, economic, social, and environmental outcomes? Answering this question is impossible without a way to measure performance, and this pap...

Environmental Impact of Supply Chains

Directions for instilling economic and environmental sustainability across product supply chains

Although sustainability is a frequent topic in product development literature, the often segmented and narrow scope of prior works limits the potential benefits of the industrial application of methods, models, and tools developed by the research community. The work herein has the goal of coalescing relevant, recent work supporting the economic and environmental aspects of sustainability for ea...

Ongoing Social Sustainability Compliance Monitoring in Supply Chains

Social sustainability issues such as child labour at a supplier pose significant reputational risk for companies. Therefore, many companies now require that suppliers follow certain standards or codes of conduct. However, in today’s complex supply chains with hundreds of sourcing locations, ongoing monitoring of compliance through audits for every supplier is hardly practical. Consequently, an ...