A circular economy perspective on sustainable supply chain management: an updated survey

Environmental and social impact of the world economy is increasingly attracting public attention around the globe. The society expects from the businesses a responsible action towards depletion of scarce natural resources, environmental pollution, and people — so as to achieve sustainable development goals. An essential element of today’s economy, supply chains represent networks of companies that create and deliver products and services to the ultimate customers. The present paper classifies scholarly research in sustainable supply chain management in terms of its main paradigms, and further reviews research work centred around the circular economy paradigm — designated commonly as closed-loop supply chain management. We offer a literature review that updates the taxonomy of this research area originally proposed by Atasu et al. in 2008. To this end, we describe analytical modelling and decision-support approaches adopted in the literature, as well as main insights offered by these. In particular, we focus on the studies that have an integrated perspective at closed-loop supply chain management by addressing supply-chain design and coordination problems and taking into account operational-level aspects. We further classify the work within the design and coordination research stream, identify connections emerged between different streams of literature over time, and suggest directions for future work.