In today’s business environment, as well as competing on cost and profitability, organisations have a new focus on sustainability (Tseng, 2013). Many studies suggest that companies with a “sustainability culture” perform better in the long run than other companies (Pagell and Wu, 2009; Lin et al., 2016). Certainly, sustainability is regarded as a key ingredient of competitive advantage. Recent researches indicate that the need for firms to be sustainable is due to pressure from stakeholders, such as government, customers and wider society (Sharfman et al., 1997; Christmann and Taylor, 2001; Zhu et al., 2007). For instance, in 2011, Greenpeace identified Apple as the “least green” technology company because of the substantial energy consumption incurred by its cloud data service (Carus, 2011). ThenApple has implemented a series of green management programs to reconstruct the business model towards sustainable consumption and production (Apple, 2015). Recently, Apple announced that 93% of its facilities are running on green energy (Kokalitcheva, 2016). This improvement regarding sustainable management of Apple has been recognised by the market and by society (Hardcastle, 2016). In China as elsewhere, manufacturers have started to consider how to make their businesses more sustainable, so as to respond to environmental regulations put in place by the government, the increasingly educated society and competitors, and their international customers (Govindan et al., 2014). Moreover, in China, tremendous economic growth has resulted in a precarious ecological situation(ZhuandSarkis, 2007;Yardley, 2005), whichreinforces the awareness of the need for sustainability. According to Zhang et al. (2002), Zhang and Wen (2008), China should implement a strategy of low resource consumption and stable and sustained economic growth. However, the research on the sustainable supply chain in developing countries such as China is not extensive, and it is still a new concept (Zhu et al., 2008a,b,c). Managers still lack holistic guidance on business decision making to deal with the sustainability issues in the current highly competitive business environment. Over the last decade, researchers have attempted to extend the boundary of sustainable development into the area of supply chain management (SCM), to investigate sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) (Pagell and Wu, 2009; Tseng et al., 2015; Tseng and Chiu, 2013). Based on the triple bottom line (TBL) standard, it is increasingly clear that SSCM should deal with both environmental and social issues (Kleindorfer et al., 2005; Corbett and Klassen, 2006; Tseng et al., 2008). However, while an increasing number of firms are starting to adopt indicators such as environment, health and safety and social factors to measure the sustainability of production (Tseng, 2013; Tseng et al., 2008; Tseng and Lin, 2009), most focus on the environmental dimension (Seuring and Muller, 2008). Researchers are keen to identify the best practices for improving environmental performance.