Reducing the Carbon Footprint within Fast‐Moving Consumer Goods Supply Chains through Collaboration: The Manufacturers' Perspective

Abstract

Within the sustainability arena, CO2 reduction has emerged as a key challenge for manufacturers in the fast‐moving consumer goods industry. This goal needs to be balanced against the competitive priorities of cost and responsiveness. Emissions‐reducing efforts are driven by the need to comply with expectations from industry and end customers and by opportunities for energy and cost savings. Manufacturers are now looking beyond their corporate boundaries to find new ways to reduce emissions along the supply chain. There is a need for research to address supplier selection in the face of sustainability challenges and provide insights about the factors affecting the transfer of sustainability skills between the manufacturer and its suppliers. This multiple case study investigates the factors that influence an organization's readiness to engage in a collaborative CO2 reduction management (CCRM) approach. We find that partner selection for CCRM exhibits path dependency in terms of the manufacturer's maturity level of sustainability; characteristics of key downstream customers, in turn, are shown to also impact this selection.

Customer and Supplier Collaboration in Green Product Innovation: External and Internal Capabilities

“…Similarly, Theißen et al . () show that firms place particular importance on relational issues such as trust, incentive alignment and innovation potential. Firms collaborate with several different partners in GPI.…”

Environmental Collaboration for Sustainability in the Construction Industry: An Exploratory Study in Italy

“…The rationale behind this statement is that sustainability is emerging as a specific supply chain management issue [86], meaning that it is no longer to be approached at the firm's level, but rather, its attainment requires the involvement of supply chain members. Consequently, several authors have studied the role of collaborative efforts in attaining more sustainable supply chains (e.g., [74,[76][77][78][79][80][87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94][95][96][97][98]). Beske and Seuring [68] have introduced four key elements of collaboration that can affect sustainability; these elements are enhanced communication, logistic integration, technological integration, and joint development.…”

The Role of Green Collaborative Strategies in Improving Environmental Sustainability in Supply Chains: Insights from a Case Study

“…More recently, the relational view (RV) has been used to analyse the role of collaborative environmental strategies to improve the environmental performance of supply chains (Theiben et al, ). The RV states that supply chain relationships among suppliers and partners can be seen as an intangible resource which creates value (Priem and Swink, ).…”

“…In particular, collaboration among supply chain partners involves benefits (e.g. knowledge sharing, complementary resources, access to partners’ experience or relation‐specific assets) which are difficult to achieve if organizations do not work together (Theiben et al, ). Stakeholder theory and RV approaches are well suited to analyse the role of collaborative strategies in achieving low‐carbon products, forming the theoretical foundation of this study.…”

“…; Schaltegger and Csutora, ; Stechemesser and Guenther, ; Theiben et al, . ; Giannarakis et al, ) to advance the development of green products (Zhao et al, ). However, carbon research at the supply chain level is still in its initial phase.…”