Impediments of product recovery in circular supply chains: Implications for sustainable development

Abstract

Product recovery has fascinated the concentration of organizations and is prominent among industry practitioners and researchers due to improved environmental concerns, social awareness, and economic benefits. Circular supply chain (CSC) compounds the concept of product recovery in global supply chain management to present a sustainable perspective. Therefore, this study aims to determine impediments of product recovery and CSC toward sustainable production and consumption in the background of manufacturing organizations. This study determines potential impediments from literature and in consultation with experts. Further, a fuzzy VIKOR approach is practiced to prioritize the impediments of product recovery and CSC. Then, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to verify the robustness of the framework attained. The results from the study reflect that “lack of collaboration from supply chain performers”, “lack of tax policies for facilitating CSC models” and “limited expertise, technology, information on CSC practices” are the critical impediments to product recovery in CSCs. The findings of the study could assist industry managers and practitioners in developing procedures and strategies to attain sustainable development.

Reverse Logistics Practices: A Dilemma to Gain Competitive Advantage in Manufacturing Industries of Pakistan with Organization Performance as a Mediator

“…However, achieving these goals simultaneously can be challenging, often leading to uncertainty. This makes the relationship between sustainability and RL unclear, even though RL studies frequently emphasize sustainability objectives [75,78].…”

Sustainability Assessment of Medicines Reverse Logistics in Brazil: Outcomes from the National and Local Systems

“…The majority of the studies in this field have been focused on understanding the factors that drive and constrain the reverse flows, and the optimization of reverse operations' efficiencies in supply chains [1][2][3]. Recently, approaches to RL have focused on the possibilities of circularity in the return of products and/or parts of products in diverse types of business sectors [24,25] including electronics [26][27][28], clothing [29,30], domestic solid wastes [31,32], packaging [33,34], and medicines [4,17,[35][36][37], amongst others. The main principles of RL have recently been clearly aligned with circular economy thinking that stimulates awareness of the supply chain stakeholders and the advantages of avoiding, reducing, reusing, refurbishing, and sharing products, and, where possible, optimizing the design stage of developing goods to facilitate more circularity during the use stage [25,38].…”

“…Given this difficulty, the links between sustainability and RL are not always explicit. Hard to control aspects, such as consumer behavior (willingness to take returned goods, willingness to pay for the returns) [43], and collaboration between stakeholders, co-exist with other aspects, such as product value, costs of RL, and the quantity and quality of returned goods, that complicate the sustainable materiality of RL [24].…”

“…To achieve this objective, the perspective of sustainability in RL [24][25][26] and the traditional SA recommended to the evaluation of politics, policies, and programs [21][22][23] were adapted into a MRLS SA framework. This intermediary step enabled the organization and the assessment of both RL systems according to four dimensions: normative, substantive, procedural, and transactive.…”

Examining the interactions among smart supply chains and carbon reduction strategies: To attain carbon neutrality

“…SSC adopts advanced technologies to connect the operations of various stakeholders in the supply chain to develop a smart connected system (Wu et al, 2016). The literature highlights previous studies analysing the latest technologies and their impacts on supply chains such as digital supply chains for circular economy (Dwivedi et al, 2023), product recovery in circular supply chains (Agrawal et al, 2023) and big data analytics in supply chains (Nguyen et al, 2018). Potential studies related to SSCs and carbon reduction strategies are discussed in the sub-section.…”