Sustainable operations, managerial decisions, and quantitative analytics of biomass supply chains: A systematic literature review

Abstract

The global sustainability development mission of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 is easy to suggest, but incredibly difficult to put into action. Fortunately, continuing reliance on green conversion technologies could effectively address business concerns of energy expenditures, ecological pollution, and fossil fuel depletion. To promote sustainable practices, many researchers and practitioners have put their hopes in the environment-friendly use of biomass. Biomass supply chain management, which contributes to saving the planet, societies, and costs, has a high potential for sustainable development. Besides, successful implementation of regulatory policies that incorporate tax and incentive strategies into decision-making processes has shifted biomass businesses toward greener practices. To this end, quantitative analytics propose primary tools in developing sustainability-driven decisions for biomass supply chains. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive classification of methodologies applied in this field which incorporate the role of policy mechanisms into managerial decisions. The current study conducts a systematic review of 450 peer-reviewed papers, where we apply a rule-governed content analysis approach that includes collecting, filtering, and categorizing the prior research in a reproducible manner. We also classify the collected materials using deductive and inductive approaches to determine various structural dimensions and associated analytic categories. In the context of biomass supply chain management, we provide evidence that energy crops and forest-based biomass are the most addressed biomass feedstock types in the existing literature, while municipal solid waste sources could be explored further in future research. Additionally, from a sustainability development perspective we show that the environmental pillar has attracted much more attention than the social aspect that accounts for job creation, safe workplace, food security, and consumer surplus.