Integrating corporate website information into qualitative assessment for benchmarking green supply chain management practices for the chemical industry

The China's chemical industry has been endeavouring to promote sustainable development through practicing green supply chain management (GSCM). This paper proposes a multi-criteria decision framework with twenty practices to guide companies in the industry to enact GSCM effectively. The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) has been used to cluster the proposed practices. We found five aspects, including economic initiatives, environmental management, eco-design, resource recycling, and stakeholder and employee, constitute the underlying structure of GSCM. A mixed decision tool combining the entropy weight method (EWM) and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been developed and applied to identify key factors. Official website information has been collected and used to analyse the website contents of five benchmarking companies in the China's chemical industry. The results reveal that the aspects of environmental management, eco-design and resource recycling are the most important GSCM themes. Moreover, the top five practices are top management support, performing life cycle assessment, managing environmental risks, advancing recycling technologies and integrating reverse logistics. Conceptual and practical implications are discussed.

Automated summary

This study proposes a multi-criteria decision framework to help companies in the Chinese chemical industry effectively implement green supply chain management. The research reveals that environmental management, eco-design, and resource recycling are the most important GSCM themes, with top management support, life cycle assessment, environmental risk management, recycling technology advancement, and reverse logistics integration being the top five practices.