An ANP-Based Model for an Effective Green Supply Chain Management

Current Trends Of Green Supply Chain Management Applications

Currently, strategies for Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) are becoming widespread in several industrial contexts as environmental sustainability of a product represents a key factor for competitive advantage. These issues are forcing the development of different approaches for evaluating the environmental sustainability level of a supply chain: according to a typical supply chain structure, green procurement, manufacturing and distribution, and finally, reverse logistics could be effective fields of interventions. By comparing with a single firm, the complexity increases in environmental sustainability analysis of a supply chain as several different companies have to coordinate their efforts in order to improve their global environmental performance (Sonesson & Berlin, 2003; Pineda-Henson & Culaba, 2004). Thus, two main types of approaches could be outlined:

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  Top-down models: which are mainly based on a global level analysis. A reference model is the well known Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) approach which allows to measure environmental sustainability of a supply chain from a system perspective (“i.e. from cradle to grave”). According to this approach, process-based strategies for GSCM are defined as “greening the supply chain processes“ (Vachon & Klassen, 2008): the aim is to link performance regarding all processes and services inside and outside factory gates.

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  Bottom-up models: which are focusing on evaluating the contribution of each individual company on the whole environmental performance of a supply chain (Gerbens-Leenes et al., 2003). Climate change, related fossil energy use, ISO 14000 guidelines refer to this category. Thus, product-based strategies - defined as “supply chain management for sustainable products” (Koplin, 2007; Seuring & Muller, 2008) – aim to determine specific requirements for each supplier in order to guarantee product environmental compatibility.