International Journal of Production Research

Vol. 50, No. 19, 1 October 2012, 5669–5670

BOOK REVIEW

Green Supply Chain Management: Product Life Cycle Approach, by H.-F. Wang and S. M. Gupta, The
McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2011, xviiþ302 pp., US $130.00 [Hardcover], ISBN 978-0-07-162283-7.

Emergence of green supply chain management (GSCM) could be attributed to the rising public awareness of
environmental problems caused by ever-increasing supply of goods and alarming depletion of virgin resources.
Technological advancements have energised the growth in production and have afforded the customers with high
quality yet inexpensive consumer goods. Availability of such products has led to a consumption revolution causing
premature and excessive disposal of products. This trend has been responsible for a tremendous depletion of virgin
resources to satisfy the awe-inspiring demands of consumers that has caused many environmental problems. Some
of the most crucial problems include ozone layer depletion, global warming, air pollution, and toxic wastes. These
problems have raised public awareness of environmental problems and have led to several regulations including
those which extend manufacturers’ responsibility beyond the point of sale. Some of the salient regulations include
end-of-life vehicle (ELV); waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE); restriction of hazardous substances
(RoHS); electronic waste recycling act; landfill directive; eco-design of energy using products (EuP); and battery
directive.
In a traditional sense, supply chain management (SCM) consists of planning, design and control of all activities
involved in the transformation of products from the raw material stage to the final product stage to fulfill the
demand of the consumer. The initial discussions on SCM were made in the early 80s. SCM was widely accepted and
implemented before the end of that decade. In the 90s, SCM started to fall short in responding to governmental
regulations and customer expectations on environmental issues. Thus, as the realisation set in that the traditional
SCM could not last as a sustainable industrial practice, it gave way to GSCM. GSCM consists of two important
phenomena: environmentally conscious management (ECM) and supply chain management (SCM). GSCM
integrates environmental responsibility into all SCM activities, including product design, material selection,
manufacturing, transportation, and information manipulation. In addition to these, GSCM extends SCM’s
coverage beyond the point of sale that leads to extended production responsibility (EPR). EPR holds producers
accountable for their products’ end-of-life (EOL) impact, and this way, forces them to manage their products
throughout their lifecycles.
‘‘Green Supply Chain Management: Product Life Cycle Approach’’ is written exclusively to address the issues
regarding environmental thinking in every phase of products’ life cycle. The authors, who are frequent contributors
to the production and industrial engineering literature, take advantage of their international collaboration to
provide a rigorous, conceptual and mathematical coverage on all aspects of GSCM.
The book consists of four parts. Part 1: Basic Concepts and Background includes two chapters. Chapter 1
introduces the development of GSCM, evolution of GSCM from SCM, and impact of GSCM on industry. Chapter
2 provides a mathematical background on fuzzy numbers and arithmetic, utility theory, the analytic hierarchy
process (AHP), and optimization programming.
Part 2: Green Engineering Technology has three chapters. Green engineering concepts, such as ‘‘design for X’’,
life-cycle analysis (LCA), material selection, green design guidelines, product recovery at the EOL, and the 12
principles of green engineering are presented in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 introduces WEEE and RoHS directives, and
then provides information about common production materials from an environmental point of view. In Chapter 5,
design for disassembly index (DfDI) and use of sensor embedded products are discussed.
Part 3: Green Value Chain Management has five chapters. Chapter 6 explains vendor evaluation, selection, and
risk analysis using AHP with the help of a realistic numerical example. Green lot-sizing models under certain and
uncertain manufacturing/re-manufacturing environments are presented in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 provides
optimization models for green logistics for certain and uncertain situations. Chapter 9 focuses on green customers,
questionnaire design, and statistical analysis, and then provides a numerical target customer identification example
to illustrate the covered methods. In Chapter 10, life-cycle effects on quality and quantity of returned products and

ISSN 0020–7543 print/ISSN 1366–588X online

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5670 Book review

recovery option selection are discussed, disassembly concept is introduced, and a mathematical disassembly-to-
demand (D2D) model is proposed.
Database for life-cycle assessment and web-based information support systems are presented in Part 4: Green
Information Management Systems. There are two chapters in this part. Chapter 11 discusses the procedure of LCA,
data collection, emission quantification, and impartial third-party verification. Finally, Chapter 12 focuses on web-
based recommender systems considering an illustrative example.
GSCM has recently been studied by many researches, thanks to the consumers’ growing environmental
awareness in recent years. It is now widely known that environmental responsibility is an indispensable phenomenon
for the companies who are willing to stay in business. This 2011 monograph presents a complete overview on all
aspects of GSCM. Numerical examples mitigate the comprehension of the proposed mathematical approaches and
give a practical value to them. Balanced use of verbal and mathematical language makes the book a valuable
reference for engineering and business schools as well as for practitioners in industry. Background information and
references are useful in terms of showing the big picture and also leading the interested reader to a more thorough
research. To this end, researchers, instructors and students who work or study in any environmentally responsible
engineering area will find great benefits in this book. In any case, it is an unquestionable information source for
logistics, operations, and production managers as well as environmental, industrial, manufacturing, design, and
information engineers who work in responsible production companies.

Onder Ondemir
Industrial Engineering Department
Yildiz Technical University, Turkey
Email: oondemir@yildiz.edu.tr
ß 2012 Onder Ondemir
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2011.644657
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