From Sustainable Supply Chains to Closed-Loop Systems: A Critical Overview of Scientific Literature

Environmental consciousness has become critical in the design and operations management. In recent years, the sort of issues that have come to light and drawn the attention of managers has extended staggeringly. Sustainable development is a significant component of growing interest for managers who have to address with social and environmental issues related to the own company as well as their supply chain partners, just to remain competitive in an increasingly aware world. Green Supply Chain Management (GrSCM) emerged as an important approach for enterprises involving the application of environmental management principles to the supply chain and showing as a new way to address the sustainability challenge. Being part of this approach, green logistics looks for the best way to produce and distribute goods in a sustainable way and hence Reverse Logistics (RL) is consider as one of the key aspects of green logistics management. As a result, there is a need to study reverse logistics across supply chains. At first, this paper takes a look at several definitions and provides a general view from sustainable supply chains through reverse logistics to closed-loop supply chains. Further the paper introduces current research topics of closed-loop supply chains and provides an overview of the single papers. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to integrate two concepts: RL process with closed-loop systems to better understand the relation between both and contribute to the knowledge and practice of measuring and controlling sustainable supply chains.