Environmental problems are one of the important issues that governments and commercial organizations all over the world pay attention to. Generally, all countries have established a mixed environmental management system with government control as the mainstay, supplemented by market regulation, and advocating the conscious action of enterprises and the public. As enterprises are always faced with the pressure of balance between market and environmental performance, more and more researchers realize that only by integrating environmental improvement activities into the strategic planning and daily operation of enterprises can the conflict between them be completely solved. Based on this idea, green supply chain was first put forward in a research on "environmentally responsible manufacturing" sponsored by National Science Foundation (NRC) 1996, and its connotation is still developing and improving. At first, Narasimhan and Carter( 1998) only defined the green supply chain as a purchasing function, and added environmental awareness to the procurement of raw materials. Steve v walton (1998+0998) and others think that green supply chain is to add suppliers to the environmental strategy of enterprises, and its core is to apply the idea of integrated management to the supply chain field. M. h. Nagel(2oo) pointed out that green supply chain involves the whole process of product use, composition and production, and emphasized the long-term and stable strategic relationship within the supply chain. Sean Giblber(2000) further expanded the scope of green supply chain, and thought that green supply chain management is the design, procurement, production, distribution, use and reuse for the purpose of environmental friendliness, as well as the management strategies, actions and cooperative relations formed in the supply chain. George A.Zsidisin and Sue P.Siferd(200 1+0) define the green supply chain as the impact on the natural environment that a single enterprise in the supply chain should pay attention to when designing, purchasing, producing, selling, using, reusing and treating its product waste. Managers, employees and board of directors constitute the internal factors of green supply chain, while customers, suppliers, trading partners, government and competitors constitute the external factors. Jeremy Ha 1l(2000) holds a comprehensive view that green supply chain is an ecological design of the whole supply chain from the purchase, production and consumption of raw materials to the recycling of waste from the sustainable development of society and enterprises. Through the close cooperation between various departments and enterprises within the supply chain, the environmental management of the whole supply chain can be coordinated and unified, and the system environment can be optimized. To sum up, with the development of theory and practice, the connotation of green supply chain has gradually expanded, including not only manufacturing activities or product transformation activities, but also environmental design, supplier operation process improvement and evaluation system, gradually integrating supply chain with environmental protection.
Second, the research status of green supply chain
1: the connotation of green supply chain. Green supply chain originates from the idea of supply chain management and sustainable development. From the existing research, the concept and connotation of green supply chain have not been deeply studied and analyzed, and a complete conceptual system has not been formed. The main reason is that green supply chain and green supply chain management were put forward for a short time, and they didn't start to study until the mid-1990s. At the same time, researchers mostly apply the ideas of supply chain and supply chain management to the new field of green supply chain. Judging from the existing research results, scholars have different emphases on the definition of green supply chain. To define green supply chain, we must make clear the connotation of supply chain. Stevens (1989) thinks that "supply chain is a series of continuous activities such as planning, adjusting, controlling materials, distributing and manufacturing in the process of goods transferring from suppliers to customers, and mainly cares about the logistics and information in the supply chain". O 'Brien and Hyde (1995) believe that under the condition of economic globalization, the supply chain should also include issues related to government supervision and culture. Other researchers emphasized the importance of strategic decision-making. On the basis of predecessors' research, Chinese researcher Wang Yingluo and others defined green supply chain as: green supply chain refers to a series of activities such as material acquisition, processing, packaging, warehousing, transportation, sales, use, scrapping and recycling based on the principles of intergenerational equity and intra-generational equity, with the goal of optimizing resource allocation, improving welfare and adapting reality to the environment. It consists of suppliers, manufacturers, sellers, retailers and consumers.
From the definition of green supply chain, its connotation is different from the traditional supply chain, which is embodied in the following points:
(1) The goal of green supply chain operation is the optimal allocation of resources, welfare enhancement and environmental compatibility.
(2) According to the composition of the system, its members are wider than the traditional supply chain.
(3) The operation of green supply chain is based on the movement of logistics, information flow, capital flow and knowledge flow.
2. Conceptual model of green supply chain. In the research of supply chain conceptual model, only a few researchers are involved in the conceptual model of green supply chain. In his thesis, Dr. Benita M.Beamon of the University of Washington put forward the conceptual model of green supply chain. Its core idea is to add the following activities to the original general conceptual model of supply chain, namely remanufacturing, recycling and recycling. At the same time, Ye described the movement direction of waste generated in the process of supply, manufacturing, sales and consumption. Remko I.van Hoek of Cranfield School of Management in Britain also put forward a conceptual model of green supply chain, whose main contribution is to analyze how to manage all links in the green supply chain and increase the members of the green supply chain to service organizations. Based on the analysis of the above research, the researchers obtained the conceptual model of green supply chain, as follows:
From the conceptual model of green supply chain and the previous analysis of its connotation, we can draw the characteristics of green supply chain, which are embodied in the following five aspects:
(1) integrity. The integrity of the system is very obvious in the green supply chain.
(2) purpose. The existence of green supply chain is based on the realization of certain goals.
(3) hierarchy. From the conceptual model of green supply chain, its structure has obvious hierarchy.
(4) Environmental adaptability.
(5) Complexity.
3. The characteristics of green supply chain research. Green supply chain management is an important means to improve the efficiency of environmental management. Although the time is short, it has attracted the attention of various fields, including academia and business circles. Judging from the current research situation, it has the following characteristics:
(1) The research methods and means mainly rely on case studies and questionnaires. There are many qualitative studies. However, there are few quantitative studies.
(2) Most research results focus on the conceptual level and operational level.
(3) Emphasize the study of environmental management with the idea of integration.
3. Further research areas of green supply chain
The research on green supply chain has only a history of 1O years since its concept was put forward. Because it involves a wide range of fields, many uncertain factors and complicated research, the current research is not in-depth and there are still many fields to be developed. It needs not only the support of new research methods, tools and theories, but also more empirical and quantitative research by researchers to solve practical problems. Therefore, in further research, we need to pay attention to the following factors:
1. Integration of theories and methods of various disciplines. From the existing research results, green supply chain management needs to be environment-friendly while optimizing resource allocation, so it needs to synthesize the achievements of theories and methods including modern optimization means and methods, environmental management technology and other disciplines. At the same time, because green supply chain management emphasizes its industrial characteristics, the engineering technology and knowledge of its research object should become one of the important sources of research methods and theoretical basis.
2. Refinement of scientific problems. Because the research in this field has been carried out for a short time, the mature scientific problems have not been clarified, and a considerable part of the existing research results are operation-oriented, and there are few related researches on green supply chain management technology, so refining scientific problems has become an important prerequisite for further research.
3. Combination of theoretical research and applied research. There are relatively few theoretical achievements in the existing research, and the conclusions of a considerable number of theoretical research achievements are conclusions themselves. For example, the implementation of green supply chain management is conducive to improving the environmental management performance of enterprises. Management research itself is to solve management problems, that is, to emphasize application, but it needs to pay equal attention to basic theoretical research. Strengthen the quantitative research of green supply chain, and increase the practicality and depth of the research.
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