Towards the Evaluation of Environment and Business Trade-offs in Supply Chains

Supply chains (SCs) are one of the most environment impacting systems. Analysis of such systems should thus take into account not only performance but also environment indicators. The amount of energy consumed for producing goods and the total emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) of an activity are examples of such indicators. This paper presents a framework for assessing performance as well as Global Warming Potential (GWP) and exergy indicators in SCs. In order, exergy accounting helps on finding reliable GWP indicators for different energy sources adopted in the supply chain. This framework supports the evaluation of supply chainsʼ business and environment indicators trade-offs using a unified model. A real case study is conducted to demonstrate the application of the proposed modeling technique.