Sustainability and industrial ecology require closing the loop of material and product flows. Grave concerns about local and regional impacts on air, ground and water pollution, and increased risk to health and safety of community residents from industrial activities have led to significant increase in interest in research at the intersection of management and operations in a sustainable environment. Environmental and legislative pressures play a major role in requiring manufacturers to take back their products at the end of products' life cycles. At the same time, manufacturers also want to present themselves as green corporate citizens. Companies have felt both internal and external pressures that are economic and political. While external pressure includes issues such as legislation, corporate citizenship and green customers, internal pressures include increasing revenues and utilizing limited resources in an optimal fashion. In early environmental management frameworks, operations managers were only involved at arms length, with different organizational units having sole responsibility for ensuring environmental excellence in process design, new product development and operational execution. Things have clearly changed now; The 1980s experienced a revolution in quality management and the 1990s experienced the new world of electronic commerce. It has become clear now that best practice calls for integrating environmental management with on-going supply chain management efforts in a sustainable environment.
The research challenges are significant and have captured the interest of operations management scholars and practitioners around the globe. Given the significance of this problem, this special issue seeks to publish papers that address the cutting-edge of this critical link between operations and management in a sustainable environment.
The special issue will seek to answer a variety of issues including: 1) Value Recovery from Product Returns: Most manufacturers struggle to ensure a smooth flow of returned products and to recover maximum value from these products. Given that product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter, an efficient closed loop supply chain can save large amounts of money for the manufacturers. One issue is how to recover maximum value from returned products along a supply chain.
- Value of information: In several industries, remanufacturing has become an important alternative of the production process. Remanufacturing facilities usually face a huge trade-off between limited information about remanufacturing yields and potentially long supplier lead times. To improve performance for production, these