Supply chain planning with sustainability considerations: an integrative framework

This paper proposes a modelling framework for combining supply chain planning and sustainability assessment, illustrating how sustainability assessments of logistic activities can be improved by supply chain planning input, and supply chain planning can in turn make use of the results from sustainability assessments.

We use mathematical programming for the supply chain planning and life cycle assessment for the modelling and quantification of the environmental impacts. We illustrate the benefits of our integrated framework for a case of production, distribution and storage of food products produced on industrial scale, studying several important planning decisions like temperature treatments and choice of packaging materials.