A proactive model in sustainable food supply chain: Insight from a case study

Recently more and more companies are adopting proactive sustainable strategies and developing sustainable supply chain management practices. Researchers identify Closed-Loop Supply Chain (CLSC) models as one of the major contributors to realising sustainable operations. Such models typically use flows concerning the products only as the unit of analysis. This paper intends to provide a basis for developing new CLSC models, extending them to recovery resources from general outputs (e.g. unavoidable waste) with no value in terms of products. The new modelS affect also the configuration of the CLSC, with different set of resource suppliers and logistics providers. The case study analysed in this paper derives from the food sector, in which the waste produced is reused as a resource, avoiding the disposal of different materials through resource-recovery activities that allow waste to be returned to the main supply chain as valuable inputs to configure a new supply chain. The principal objective of this study is to create a new sustainable model of CLSC using and recovering waste from meat processing. A profitability indicator, an energy self-sufficiency one and a qualitative assessment of social implications are introduced to evaluate global sustainability opportunities for activating new loops. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.