Green Supply Chain Management

Today, one of the key priorities in corporate strategic design for an organisation is to emerge as socially responsible and sustainable through environmental protection. As a focal part of sustainability initiatives, green supply chain management has emerged as a key strategy that can provide competitive advantage with significant gains for the company’s bottom line. In designing green supply chains the intent is to adopt comprehensively and across business boundaries, from product conception to the end-of-life recycling stage. Under this context, green initiatives relate to tangible and intangible corporate benefits. Sustainability reports of many companies indicate that the greening of their supply chains has helped them to reduce their operating cost with increased sustainability of their business.

This book combines chapter summaries, boxed case studies, annotated further readings, discussion questions and illustrations in order to provide a strategic overview of sustainable supply chain management, and shed light on the theoretical background and principles of the topic. Accessible and student-friendly, Green Supply Chain Management covers the following thematic areas: introduction to green supply chain management; benefits of green supply chain management; impact of green supply chain in supply chain operations; challenges in the implementation of green supply chain management in real life companies; and contemporary issues of green supply chain.

This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners in the fields of sustainable business and supply chain management.

Charisios Achillas is an Academic Associate at the School of Economics, Business Administration & Legal Studies of the International Hellenic University (Thessaloniki, Greece), and visiting Lecturer at the Department of Logistics of the Technological Educational Institute of Central Macedonia (Katerini, Greece).

Dimitrios Aidonis is a Lecturer at the Department of Logistics of the Technological Educational Institute of Central Macedonia, Greece.

Dionysis Bochtis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering of Faculty of Science and Technology at Aarhus University, Denmark (Research Unit: Operations Management). He also acts as an Invited Professor at the International Hellenic University and at the University of Torino.

Dimitris Folinas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Logistics in TEI of Central Macedonia, Greece.