Content area
Full Text
1 Introduction
The concept of sustainability is of growing interest in the last two decades among policy makers, the popular press and scientific journals in various technical fields (Linton et al. , 2007). The scarcity of resources, problems with pollution caused by industrialized countries (Tahvonen, 2000) and the environmental, social and economic uncertainty of recent years (Schneider et al. , 2010) have led many researchers to address the issue of sustainable development from many points of view. European Union (EU) legislation has highlighted the importance of products recovery and recycling. Different directives have been released in the last ten years for regulating waste management policies. From an operations management point of view, closed-loop supply chains (CLSCs) represent one of the main supply chain (SC) structures that received great interest from both industry and academic worlds. Research on reverse logistics and CLSCs is considerably increasing because tightly linked with industrial ecology (Adenso-Díaz et al. , 2012; Carter and Easton, 2011; Mollenkopf et al. , 2011; Georgiadis and Besiou, 2010; Nasr and Thurston, 2006; Rubio et al. , 2008) and the development of new strategies (Skinner et al. , 2008). Products recovery and reuse reduce the negative effects on environment, mainly reducing waste disposal, extraction of raw materials and transport and distribution emissions. Furthermore, firms can recover value from end-of-life products by reusing components, recycling materials or recovering energy through incineration (Kleindorfer et al. , 2005). Finally, reverse logistics practices can reduce the customer ' s risk when buying a product, and increase the customer value (Russo and Cardinali, 2012; Rogers and Tibben-Lembke, 2001). However, the success of reverse logistics implementation requires the coordination of forward and backward flows of both materials and information (Guide and Van Wassenhove, 2002). The reverse flow of products entering the chain impacts the dynamics of SC members ' inventories. This, in turns, affects the dynamics of order placed to suppliers and, thus, impacts the performance of the entire SC in terms of the order and inventory variance amplification. Thus, although reverse logistics may bring benefits in terms of economic and green sustainability, and also customer values, SC managers could still be reluctant in adopting such kind of SC structure due to its negative impact on the dynamics (both order and...