E-commerce and the environment: a gateway to the renewal of greening supply chains

Electronic commerce is expected to influence a wide range of supply chain systems and thus lead to unidentified environmental impacts. Current studies discussing the impacts have the problem common in that they arrive either at conflicting or un-generalisable results. This article addresses the issue of methodology and proposes an assessment model for the resolution of this problem. Some important implications of this novel model for supply chain management are presented. This article shows that the subject of “Greening supply chains” is in need of a new focus and direction in research which involves building a new set of constructs for decision-making. Several benefits of this are addressed. Research in this subject is somewhat stagnating nowadays; it lacks specific research themes that are necessary for the integration of the available knowledge. Our model, proposed in this paper, represents a meeting point of the need of renewal of this subject, and the need to evaluate large-scale issues such as electronic commerce.