Designing sustainable supply chains based on the Triple Bottom Line approach

Companies worldwide are nowadays facing a growing pressure to reduce environmental and social impacts of their production and distribution activities. However, the strategies employed to achieve these goals are not clearly defined because of the (very often) conflicting relations with financial goals (i.e., economic dimension). These three dimensions of performance measurement are used in the literature to categorise sustainability. The management of the sustainable enterprise can be understood as a decision-making process looking to simultaneously achieve these three goals. As a consequence, accurate methodologies are required to help decision-makers designing the most economically-, socially- and environmentally-efficient supply chain. This paper presents a quantitative methodology, based on mixed-integer linear programming (MILP), for the inclusion of sustainability metrics in the design of supply chains. Numerical results show the impact that valuation of the objective function (each of the three dimensions of sustainability) may have on the final supply chain design decision. These results are promising and open opportunities for further research.