Achieving sustainable development through strategic green supply chain management

Environmentally and socially responsive supply chains are in the early adoption stages in India. Global supply chains need worldwide goals, and the key to the success of Green Supply Chain Management is to bring the worldwide industry together to decide upon and pledge to work towards reasonable and concrete goals that will make a real difference to the environment. Customers are increasingly demanding to know where products come from, how they are made and distributed and what impact future environmental legislations will have on the products they buy. The aim of this paper is to provide action plans and facilitate knowledge among supply chain practitioner that they need to go green the business efficiently, and communicate these efforts to their customers, partners, and the public. In fact, the paper discusses the key drivers for green initiatives include government compliance, improved customer and public relations, a decreased fuel bill and financial ROI through various supply chain initiatives such as reverse logistics. Further, increasing supply chain efficiency, improving investor relations, decreasing risk and a larger corporate responsibility agenda are identified as important factors in the strategic decision to go green. Companies working in India are not properly addressing these measures in supply chain design and operations. That is why, the paper further elaborates strategic management of green supply chain, which involves collecting and analyzing environmental regulations and customer concerns, discussing the relevant environmental issues with the procurement, manufacturing and quality control departments across the supply chain firms and finally developing and communicating the green supply chain policies to all members of the supply chain i.e. supplier’s supplier to customer’s customer.