E-commerce and the environment: a gateway to the renewal of greening supply chains

Abstract

Electronic commerce is expected to influence a wide range of supply chain systems and thus lead to unidentified environmental impacts. Current studies discussing the impacts have a problem that they arrive at conflicting results or ungeneralisable works. This article addresses the issue of methodology and proposes an assessment model for the resolution of this problem. In the meantime, this article shows that research on the subject of "greening supply chains" is in need of a new focus and direction, which involves building a new set of constructs for decision making whose benefits are addressed. Our model, proposed in this paper, represents a meeting point of the need for renewal of this subject, and the need to evaluate large-scale issues such as electronic commerce.