A multi-criteria approach for strategic evaluation of supply chain environmental sustainability

The incorporation of environmental issue in supply chain (SC) performance analysis is becoming essential due to both customer and legislative requirements for green products. Thus, the present paper proposes a systematic approach to support a firm to evaluate its own supply chain environmental performances. The approach integrates index methods for Environmental Performance Evaluation (EPE) with a multi-criteria model based on the Analytic Network Process (ANP). Index methods, represent a synthetic but effective approach for performance analysis allowing a quick tool for target setting and performance monitoring. Otherwise, they could not be so helpful when the influence of interrelationships at SC level has to be evaluated. Thus, the ANP supports decision making by evaluating priorities in order to support environmental sustainability of a supply chain; as a quantitative approach, it usually requires higher computational effort. The proposed tool could support decision makers in the context of SC environmental sustainability for both strategic (e.g. selection of a distribution or packaging strategy) and operative (e.g. supplier performances’ monitoring) decisions. The approach has been validated in a real case study concerning the glass production supply chain. Results obtained have confirmed the model as an efficient tool for strategic evaluation of SC environmental sustainability