Drivers and barriers to environmental supply chain management practices: Lessons from the public and private sectors

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pursup.2008.01.007Get rights and content

Abstract

This study explores the factors that drive or hinder organisations to implement green supply chain management initiatives. A literature review identifies the main categories of internal and external drivers of green supply chain management practices, including organisational factors, regulation, customers, competitors and society, but there is little indication of suppliers as drivers for green supply chain management. Internal barriers include cost and lack of legitimacy, whereas external barriers include regulation, poor supplier commitment and industry specific barriers. An explorative study is conducted based on interviews from seven different private and public sector organisations. Encouragingly, across the organisations, more drivers than barriers to environmental supply chain management are identified. Organisations seem to be more influenced by external rather than internal drivers. The barriers to environmental supply chain management experienced by organisations tend to be both internal and external.

Introduction

Today as never before people are concerned with the environment and climate change (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007). In the field of business and management, there is an increasing onus on the role of organisations in society (McWilliams and Siegel, 2000; Strandberg, 2002), and their responsibilities to minimise impacts upon the environment (Hart, 1995; Henriques and Sadorsky, 1999). One aspect of this is green supply chain management issues, and how organisations can maximise the potential of their suppliers to adopt green supply chain management practices (Srivastava, 2007; Zhu et al., 2005). Examples of green supply chain management practices could include reducing packaging and waste, assessing vendors on their environmental performance, developing more eco-friendly products and reducing carbon emissions associated with transport of goods. In some instances, improving environmental supply has been seen as beneficial as it can reduce costs and improve organisational performance (Carter et al., 2000; Hervani and Helms, 2005), or enhance a firm's reputation (Wycherley, 1999). Others have viewed environmental supply initiatives with more scepticism, as reactive to government environmental regulation such as cutting down on waste (Porter and Van de Linde, 1995), or as simple a ‘greenwash’ or PR exercise (Greer and Bruno, 1996). This study aims to look beyond the rhetoric and investigate the real as opposed to espoused reasons for organisations engaging in green supply chain management practices.

The majority of studies of environmental supply chain management initiatives have been conducted in the private sector. This is unfortunate, as the public sector may, by virtue of its being concerned with societal development and ‘well-being’, be a setting conducive to environmental supply projects. It is difficult to interpret whether the preference for private sector studies indicates a lack of environmental supply practices in the public sector, or that the public sector is simply being under-researched. Rarely, studies attempt to include both private and public sector views of greening the supply chain (New et al., 2002), and this study adopts such an approach. This study contributes to environmental supply literature and seeks to answer the research questions:

  • What drives public and private sector organisations to integrate environmentally friendly practices in their supply chains?

  • What are the barriers to environmentally friendly practices in the supply chain?

This paper seeks to make the following contributions to the green supply chain management literature. It seeks to investigate whether organisations are influenced more by internal or external factors when they embark on environmental supply projects. It also investigates whether organisations perceive more drivers or barriers to environmental supply projects.

The paper is structured as follows. A literature review follows that identifies and groups drivers and barriers to green supply chain management practices. The methodology for the study is then presented. The next section outlines the findings of the study. Identified drivers and barriers to green supply chain management are then discussed in the context of the literature. Finally, conclusions are drawn, including limitations of the research and future research directions.

Section snippets

Literature review

This literature review considers in turn drivers and barriers to environmental supply chain management. The literature on drivers for greening purchasing and supply practices is reviewed in the next section, and grouped into internal and external drivers. Internal drivers are described here as organisational factors, and the external drivers include regulation, customers, competition, and society.

Method and analysis

In this study, an explorative study was conducted based on interviews from seven different organisations, to explore barriers and drivers to green supply chain management practices. Seven organisations agreed to participate, having been approached through consultation with two experts in green supply chain management, to include large public and private sector organisations that might be particularly informative on green supply chain management issues, and that the experts had existing links

Findings

Seven organisations were investigated in the study. Table 3 presents some basic information about the seven organisations with respect to their size, contextual situation, environmental policies and activities. All seven investigated organisations turnover at least £350 m per year or operate with an annual budget of at least £775 million. The number of suppliers that provide goods and services to these organisations varies from 250 to several thousand.

Brief vignettes follow of the organisations

Discussion

In this section the main drivers and barriers identified in the exploration of green supply chain management projects are reflected upon in the light of the literature. The findings presented in Table 4, Table 5 are compared with the literature summarised in Table 1, Table 2, to contrast our empirical findings with previous research.

Conclusion

Organisations appear to have a variety of drivers and barriers to green supply chain management practices. A literature review revealed that there have been more studies identifying drivers than barriers, possibly due to the desire to focus on the positive aspects of green supply chain management research. In our explorative study we found both drivers and barriers, with more drivers such as regulation that were common across organisations, compared to a variety of barriers. This study

References (56)

  • B.M. Beamon

    Environmental and sustainability ethics in supply chain management

    Science and Engineering Ethics

    (2005)
  • F. Bowen

    Environmental visibility: a trigger for organisational response?

    Business Strategy and the Environment

    (2000)
  • F. Bowen et al.

    Horses for courses: explaining the gap between the theory and practice of green supply

    Greener Management International

    (2001)
  • F. Bowen et al.

    The role of supply management capabilities in green supply

    Production and Operations Management

    (2001)
  • F. Caro et al.

    Evaluating the economic costs of environmental measures in plantation harvesting through the use of mathematical models

    Production and Operations Management

    (2003)
  • C.R. Carter et al.

    Inter-organizational determinants of environmental purchasing: initial evidence from the consumer products industries

    Decision Sciences

    (1998)
  • C.R. Carter et al.

    Purchasing's role in environmental management: cross-functional development of grounded theory

    Supply Chain Management

    (2001)
  • C.R. Carter et al.

    Environmental purchasing: benchmarking our German counterparts

    International Journal of Purchasing and Materials Management

    (1998)
  • R. Cooper et al.

    A multinational comparison of key ethical issues, helps and challenges in the purchasing and supply management profession: the key implications for business and the professions

    Journal of Business Ethics

    (2000)
  • M. Delmas
    (2001)
  • M. Drumwright

    Socially responsible organisational buying: environmental concern as a non-economic buying criteria

    Journal of Marketing

    (1994)
  • M.E. Ferguson et al.

    The effect of competition on recovery strategies

    Production & Operations Management

    (2006)
  • S. Fineman

    Constructing the green manager

  • Y. Gabriel et al.

    Organizing and Organizations

    (2000)
  • J. Greer et al.

    Greenwash: The reality Behind Corporate Environmentalism

    (1996)
  • K. Green et al.

    Purchasing and environmental management: interactions, policies and opportunities

    Business Strategy and the Environment

    (1996)
  • J. Hall

    Environmental supply chain innovation

    Greener Management International

    (2001)
  • M.D. Hanna et al.

    Linking operational and environmental improvement through employee involvement

    International Journal of Operations & Production Management

    (2000)
  • Cited by (0)

    1

    Tel.: +44 20 7568 9389; fax: +44 20 7567 2425.

    2

    Tel.: +44 118 980 8600; fax: +44 118 980 8653.

    View full text