۱- Introduction

۲- Evolving view on sustainability in supply chains

۳- Towards the ESSC conceptual framework

۴- Conclusions and outlook

References

Abstract

In today’s growing economy, overconsumption and overproduction have accelerated environmental deterioration worldwide. Consumers, through unsustainable consumption patterns, and producers, through production based on traditional resource depleting practices, have contributed significantly to the socio-environmental problems. Consumers and producers are linked by supply chains, and as sustainability became seen as a way to reverse socio-environmental degradation, it has also started to be introduced in research on supply chains. We look at the evolution of research on sustainable supply chains and show that it is still largely focused on the processes and networks that take place between the producer and the consumer, hardly taking into account consumer behavior and its influence on the performance of the producer and the supply chain itself. We conclude that we cannot be talking about sustainability, without extending the supply chains to account for consumers’ behavior and their influence on the overall system performance. A conceptual framework is proposed to explain how supply chains can become sustainable and improve their economic and socio-environmental performance by motivating consumer behavior toward green consumption patterns, which, in turn, motivate producers and suppliers to change their operations.

Evolving view on sustainability in supply chains

There are quite a few recent literature reviews available on sustainable and green supply chains. For e.g. Govindan et al. (2015), Ansari and Kant (2017), Barbosa-Povoa et al. (2017)
, Bastas and Liyanage (2018) and Koberg and Longoni (2019). In this paper, we focus on the evolution of the SSC concept in literature to show how it was gradually embracing additional ideas and mechanisms relevant to sustainability, while stopping short of including the consumer behavior into the picture. Some of the most important papers in this area include publications by White and Lee (2009), who discussed a framework for integration of social sustainability in SSC analytical approaches, Jaehn (2016), who gave an overview of sustainable operations, Stindt (2017), who described a general framework for decision-making in SSC, and Gaur et al. (2016), who presented an overview of behavioral and operational aspects of waste collection and reverse logistics. Logistics and transportation, network design, production operation and product design are the most discussed topics in the SSC context. While there are hundreds of papers published in this area, here we mention only the most relevant ones as illustrations for each topic, for each category of SC analyses in the typology that we have identified. They are critically compared and contrasted so that the gap of what still needs to be known and researched can be identified. Scientific databases such as Scopus and ScienceDirect were used to search for relevant papers containing keywords such as “sustainable” or “green” together with “supply chain” and “closed-loop supply chain” within their title, abstract, or keywords.