Investigation of Green Criteria With Clustering Analysis in Green Supplier Selection

Introduction

Businesses establish supply chains for products and services they provide. One of the most important steps in any supply chain is the selection of a supplier that fits for demands and expectations of the business. Suppliers that are part of a green supply chain are expected to be green suppliers. Suppliers that adopt green practices, manage their waste, comply with societal and legal norms about the environment and run environmental management systems are preferable for green supply chains (Büyüközkan & Vardaloğlu, 2008). Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods are adopted often for the selection of a green supplier.

These methods are based on comparison and grading of alternatives, which provides selection of the best one or ranking the alternatives. It enables to offer rational solutions for complicated problems in the light of considerations that contradict one another (Triantaphyllou, 2000). There are a variety of MCDM methods in the literature. Among the most popular ones are Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), Elimination and Choice Translating Reality English (ELECTRE), and Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE). Freeman and Chen (2015) implemented Entropy and TOPSIS along with integrated AHP. Espinilla et al. (2015) adopted ELECTRE, Gupta and Barua (2017) used BWM (Best-Worst Method) and fuzzy TOPSIS, and Kumar et al. (2017) implemented fuzzy ELECTRE. Similarly, literature also offers studies over the selection of green suppliers through goal programming and optimization. A thorough literature review was performed in this study. It was intended that observing current trends by choosing a time period covering recent dates produces more accurate and consistent results. Thus, it was deemed appropriate to include the studies between 2014-2021. The Web of Science Core Collection database was selected for literature review. The reason for choosing this database is to access articles published in quality journals with well-known indexes. An online search was performed on this database using these keywords: “green supplier” or “green supplier selection” or “green supplier evaluation” or “green supplier multi-criteria decision making” in the topic section. Only articles were chosen and books, book chapters, conference papers, theses, and other academic publications were excluded from the search. In addition, the timespan was set from 2014 to 2021, and only articles written in English were considered. It was desired to select green supplier selection articles that included at least one MCDM method, one case study, and considered appropriate for the scope of the study. All of the articles reached from the database were first subjected to abstract scanning and those that were not suitable for the study were excluded. 50 articles that were eligible after full-text scanning were included in the study.