Since last couple of decades, environmental issues have been increasing and traveling faster than forest fire, country to region, region to world level territory, which is a serious cause of climate change and global warming. In addition, scarcity of natural resources and air and water pollution badly affect the fauna and flora, human life with different diseases they cause definitely, such like ischaemic heart disease, lung cancer, chronic obstruction pulmonary disease, stroke, Dracunculiasis, Cholera, Hepatitis, Typhoid fever, and Norovirus. While, the green supply chain concept occurs to mitigate environmental degradations and control air, water and waste pollution through the adoption of green practices in business operations. Undeniably, the basic ideology behind green concept is to enhanced environmental sustainability, but firms adopt green concept as “kill two enemies with one bullet”. Because green supply chain can reduce the environmental pollution and production costs and it also can spur economic growth, create competitive advantage in terms of greater customer satisfaction, positive image and reputation and provide better opportunity to export their products in pro-environmental countries. The definition of green idea is expanding with new innovations and techniques to protect environmental sustainability, which can be recognized by corporate social responsibility, green manufacturing, waste reduction, recycling and remanufacturing sustainable/environmental friendly supply chain, green supply chain, etc.
Green supply chain management can be defined as the process of integrating environmental thinking into supply chain management including production design, material sourcing and selection, manufacturing processes, delivery of the final production to the customers and end of life management of the production after its useful life.
Green supply chain on the other hand is the process of using environmentally friendly inputs and transforming these inputs through change agents whose by products can improve or improve or be recycled within existing environment. Supply chain management is the coordination and management of complex network of activities involved in delivering a finished product to the user/customer. The supply chain itself is a process that at the end may produce waste causing serious pollution to the environmental threatening human health and ecological balance therefore the need to go green becomes a point of concern to many organizations.
On Monday, 25th of February 2019, a meeting was held on the establishment of a Green Supply Chain Research Group by Dr. Yavari, a member of the faculty of Industrial engineering department of the University of Qom, at the Center of Environmental Research, University of Qom. A consultation about the creation of this research group was conducted and the process is underway.