The concern about environmental and social impacts of business activities has led to introducing a new paradigm called, sustainable development. It can help to build a low-carbon high-growth global economy and guarantee the global well-being of people. In this paper, three pillars of sustainable development, i.e., economic, environmental, and social, are considered and discussed to design a supply chain network. The proposed model tries to maximize profit primarily while capturing societal community development by prioritizing the less developed regions. Moreover, the model ensures that the environmentally friendly facilities can operate in the supply chain network while others have to be repaired. Furthermore, quantifying the benefits of transportation decisions in terms of both cost and environmental impact savings to improve the sustainability of logistics systems is considered. In addition, the model is regarded as robust programming for the problem to approximate real situations. The proposed model is implemented in some numerical examples and in a real case study. Numerical results and computational analysis are indicative of the significance of the model and through conducting the case study, it is demonstrated that the proposed model can be implemented successfully in practice and it would be beneficial to all the three pillars of sustainable development. Moreover, the managerial insights for the managers of the supply chain networks are provided to make the most appropriate decisions.

Introduction

Nowadays, growing environmental concerns and social legislations have enforced the enterprises to consider them along with economic performance as three pillars of sustainability (Kannegiesser et al., 2015). This issue has been emphasized by 2030 Agenda approved by UNCTAD Secretary General’s Report (2011) as well as the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document (Mahtaney, 2013 and Basera, 2013). For the first time in 1987, the concept of “Sustainable Development” was introduced in the Brundtland Report and it was discussed with problems such as population growth and lack of sufficient resources in the future. Sustainable development means “meeting the requirements of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to fulfill their own needs” (Brundland Report, 1987) and it considers triple bottom line concept (3Ps “people, planet, profit”) (Elkington and Rowlands, 1999). Promoting sustainable development is the only way to resolve most of the global concerns such as water scarcity, inequality, hunger, poverty, and climate change. According to the previous related studies like Pishvaee et al. (2014) and Arampantzi and Minis (2017), estimating and formulating environmental and social impacts are sophisticated efforts; however, they are valuable and can play a significant role in mitigating the worldwide concerns (Zhalechian et al., 2016). Govindan et al. (2015b) reviewed 328 papers about supply chain network and emphasized that designing this network was a remarkable gap and future research opportunity.