Barriers and opportunities to greening the construction supply chain management

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate critical barriers hindering the adoption of green supply chain management (GSCM) and the opportunities that can be exploited with such an implementation in the construction industry of developing countries. It also devises strategies to avoid critical barriers in implementation and exploit opportunities for a better overall environmental performance of the construction industry. Design/methodology/approach This research relies upon an extensive literature review; data are collected from 163 professionals and 15 interviews of field professionals from 11 developing countries are conducted. The barriers and opportunities are synthesized through literature review and then data are collected over their significance from the construction professionals through an online survey. To highlight the interconnectedness of the critical barriers and opportunities, a causal loop framework is developed. Furthermore, expert opinion is sought to develop the strategies. Findings This research integrates information from different sources and provides a holistic view of the current situation of GSCM in developing countries. In total, 34 barriers and 23 opportunities are extracted from literature. The top 4 barriers fall under the “involvement and support” category, whereas the top four opportunities fall under the “environmental” category. Furthermore, the strategies to implement GSCM include suitable policies by top management to incorporate practices such as innovative green design, green procurement, green packaging, green distribution and even end-of-life management, which play a vital role in emission reduction. Originality/value This research is a first attempt at evaluating the barriers and opportunities facing GSCM in the construction sector of the developing countries. The findings encourage the stakeholders in adopting GSCM practices by presenting a clear picture of the potential benefits that can be exploited by implementing the proposed strategies to eliminate critical barriers in the construction industry.

Green Packaging from Consumer and Business Perspectives

“…These well-known dimensions have been found to be related to, at the least, economic, environmental and social performance. In particular, biodegradable packaging is an important research area for CSCM [119], although it is also important to note that there are certain critical barriers hindering the adoption of CSCM [120]. Some researchers have proposed the optimisation of decisions related to industry chain integration and green supply chain management using multi-objective decision making approaches and Pareto-based analysis [111].…”

Information-centric influence strategies for quality assurance in reverse logistics supply chains: external stakeholders' perspective

“…It is well popular that the regulatory pressures from the government are the critical impetus to promote sustainability in the CI all around the world (Ahmed et al , 2019; Liu et al , 2020; Singh and Sushil, 2021). Through a systematic literature review, Brandão et al (2021b) claimed that the government emerges as the most influential actor of the RLSC of DW, being the only stakeholder employing six influence strategies: legislation, penalties and fines, inspection, subsidies, landfill disposal fee and incorporating reprocessed products using public construction works.…”

Development of comprehensive coursework of quality management in universities pertinent to the construction industry: a case of Pakistan

“…Those factors which had less consistency of appearance or repetitions were removed from the list. Subsequently, after detailed and extensive literature review, from a pool of extracted factors only 11 factors having cumulative normalized total score less than 0.500 (values higher than this depicts lesser significance) as shown in Table 2, were finalized by performing content analysis to find their significance using Equation (1) following the methodology of Ahmed et al (2019) and Ahmad et al (2018). These factors are ranked according to their literature score attained from a two-part content analysis; in the first part, a quantitative analysis is carried out where the frequency of emergence of a factor in all the appropriate papers is assembled, and in the second part, a qualitative analysis is carried out where the impact of every factor (high, medium and low) is analyzed through a comprehensive literature review.…”

“…for extracting these course contents. Same methodology of Ahmed et al (2019) and Ahmad et al (2018) is used for finalizing the course contents of quality management. These nine course contents along with their author references have been provided in Table 1.…”