Collaborative environmental management

This chapter focuses on the collaboration of environmental management between suppliers and customers, with the selected topics ranging from environmental information integration, supplier operational adaptation, supplier/customer environmental integration, and consumer preferences. Environmental information integration (EII) is the information sharing infrastructure that supports environmental information exchange and coordination, which covers internal EII, supplier EII, and customer EII. EII is important factor for organizations to increase flexibility and promote their environmental adaptability to the changing environmental demands and requirements. Establishing a long-term supplier relationship and cooperatively investing in development and innovation with supply chain partners can be beneficial to enhance an organization’s operational flexibility, which in turns improves the organization’s environmental and economic performance. On the other hand, customer’s involvement in implementing environmental practices participation facilitates the firm’s extended producer responsibility practices and asset recovery processes. Since consumers care about the environment protection which enables their descendants to have a better life, sustainable consumption such as energy conservation, resource savings, food waste reduction, and the use of recyclable products have been gaining growing public awareness. Sustainable consumption behavior may prompt organization to rethink about environmental management practices to fulfill their final consumers’ requirements.