Environmental and Sustainable Performance from a Supply Chain Management Perspective

Abstract

Environmental performance assessment is growing strongly in importance due to environmental problems, stakeholder interests and a prevailing shortage of resources. Because of outsourcing and specialization, corporate environmental performance is largely imprinted by environmental performance along supply chains. Out of the plurality of research problems that exist in this area, we choose two which we analyze here. First, we treat the fundamental issue of green overhead allocation in the challenging case of logistics warehouses. To this aim, we draw on an analogy with activity-based costing. This offers the opportunity to distinguish between direct and indirect environmental effects, allocate these effects to process activities and assess suppliers’ logistic processes as carried out for customer firms. Second, we analyze barriers to sustainable supplier selection. Supplier selection that takes social and ecologic aspects into account is not yet established in corporate practice. We frame this problem from the perspective of information processing theory and depict an interim result regarding drivers of information processing requirements and of related information processing capacities.