Sustainability in Supply Chain Management

This chapter introduces sustainable development and its influences on supply chain management context. Sustainable development brings economical, environmental, and social concerns into managerial issues in supply chain. So working in sustainable environment will be more complex for managers who are now responsible to consider business functions from the three dimensions of sustainable developments. In this paradigm, managers seek the ways to avoid negative environmental and social impact of their operations and at the same time earn economical benefits. Furthermore, sustainability forces managers to deal with different stakeholders included in three dimensions of sustainable development. To proceed in this way, this chapter first presents environmental and social considerations and relevant stakeholders in supply chain management and offer some changes to manage the multi-dimensional and multi-stakeholder nature of the sustainable supply chain. Then, it discusses about the sustainability assessment frameworks to evaluate sustainability of a company as well as a supply chain.