Environmental Management Practices with Supply Chain Efforts

Abstract

This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the sustainability impacts of supply chain and studies the commonly-used environmental management practices of achieving supply chain sustainability including product and process stewardship, green services, and green logistics management. From the life cycle perspective, all of products, processes, and services, involve multiple stages which incur energy consumption, wastes, and pollutant emissions. Product stewardship is concerned with the environmental impact of products relating to their packaging design, production, delivery, usage, and development. Process stewardship is concerned with reducing adverse environmental impact in the processes ranging from production, distribution, to end-of-life product management. Green services are the services that are designed to have a lesser effect on environment and human health. Moreover, green logistics management which can be driven by economic pressure, customer pressure, and environmental regulation, helps mitigate the environmental footprints of forward and reverse flows of products, information, and services between origin and consumption. Last but not least, extended producer responsibility is a type of product stewardship that requires at a minimum the producer to be responsible for their product throughout the life cycle, which includes various approaches such as take-back programs, advanced recycling fee, and voluntary industry practices. Extended producer responsibility could improve market performance of businesses by materials recycle, waste reduction, and customer integration.