Environmental Friendliness in Low Carbon Supply Chain and Operations

Introduction

Increasing environmental concerns has compelled manufacturing firms to reconsider their operation strategy. Rethinking of manufacturing firm’s operations to meet customer requirements and to achieve performance in operations, economy, social and environment are necessary (Fernando, Jasmi, & Shaharudin, 2019). Nowadays, environmental issue such as climate change due to carbon emissions from manufacturing industry has become a popular topic among firms, customers and society. Evolution of shifting customer requirements from cost reduction to include more product features to product that not harmful to the environment have demand firms to change its operation management. For instance, manufacturing firms have evolved from mass production to mass customization and now towards energy management and environmental principle (Fernando, Shaharudin, Ismail, Yew, & Ganesan, 2018; Fernando, Shaharudin, Haron, Karim, & Ganesan, 2018). These shifting in strategies have seen manufacturing firms practicing just-in-time (JIT) strategy, total quality management (TQM), flexible manufacturing system (FMS), agile manufacturing (AM) strategy, lean production (LP) and supply chain management (SCM) (Gunasekaran & Ngai, 2012). These strategies are practiced by firms to achieve performances such as economic (Schandl et al., 2016), social (Beitzen-Heineke, Balta-Ozkan, & Reefke, 2017), operations (Mirkouei, Mirzaie, Haapala, Sessions, & Murthy, 2016) and environment (Nouira, Frein, & Hadj-Alouane, 2014).

Nowadays, manufacturing firms are expected to reduce environmental impacts in its supply chain and operations (Willersinn, Möbius, Mouron, Lansche, & Mack, 2017). The importance of reducing environmental impacts and threats has been studied across manufacturing sectors such as in food sector (Camanzi, Alikadic, Compagnoni, & Merloni, 2017), medical sector (Unger & Landis, 2016), automotive sector (Bechtsis, Tsolakis, Vlachos, & Iakovou, 2017), aerospace sector (Ruiz-Benitez, López, & Real, 2018), furniture sector (Fernando, Shaharudin, & Wahid, 2016) and energy sector (Fernando & Hor, 2017). These sectors need to address environmental issues especially in regard to carbon emission. Increasing carbon emission from manufacturing firms’ supply chain and operations activities are highlighted as critical issue that need attention from every stakeholder (Shaharudin & Fernando, 2015). Thus, manufacturing firms need to adopt environmental friendliness criteria to appease its stakeholders. Environmental friendliness criteria can be defined as firm’s operations that will not harm the environment through energy efficient and clean energy (Gunasekaran & Ngai, 2012).

Nevertheless, literature on environmental management are divisive for supply chain cluster and operations cluster. Most articles in the literature recognized that green supply chain management (GSCM) (Kamal & Fernando, 2015), low carbon supply chain management (LCSCM) (Shaharudin & Fernando, 2017) and sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) (Balaman, Matopoulos, Wright, & Scott, 2017) have acknowledged the importance of environmental friendliness criteria. Yet, operations cluster has fallen behind in recognizing environmental friendliness criteria (Shaharudin, Fernando, Jabbour, Sroufe, & Jasmi, 2019). While Gunasekaran and Ngai (2012) introduced the concept in operations and Balfaqih, Nopiah, Saibani and Al-Nory (2016) highlighted of its importance, an investigation on environmental friendliness criteria is still limited. Furthermore, an in-depth walkthrough of this criteria such as its definition, features and previous studies discussion should be undertaken by scholars.