Environmental management and manufacturing performance: The role of collaboration in the supply chain

As corporations attempt to move toward environmental sustainability, management must extend their efforts to improve environmental practices across their supply chain. The literature characterizing environmental management within the supply chain has been slowly building, but remains sparse. Using a survey of North American manufacturers, this paper examines the impact of environmental collaborative activities on manufacturing performance. Environmental collaboration was defined specifically to focus on inter-organizational interactions between supply chain members, including such aspects as joint environmental goal setting, shared environmental planning, and working together to reduce pollution or other environmental impacts. These practices can be directed either upstream toward suppliers or downstream toward customers. The influence of collaboration in each direction was empirically assessed for multiple objective and perceptual measures of manufacturing performance using a sample of plants in the package printing industry. Generally, the benefits of collaborative green practices with suppliers were broadest. In contrast, collaboration with customers yielded mixed outcomes. Overall, evidence emerged that upstream practices were more closely linked with process-based performance, while downstream collaboration was associated with product-based performance.