The management of environmental performance in the supply chain: an overview

The Environmental Supply Chain Management (ESCM) has become a buzz-word nowadays. This is in part due to the increasing awareness of companies that the environmental performances need to be managed beyond the organizational boundaries. The ESCM is derived from the integration of environmental management and supply chain management concepts (Srivastava 2007;Thun and Muller 2010; Head and Iraldo 2010). The environmental management is based on the principles of prevention, environmental protection, transparency and participation. Its basic goals are the identification of environmental issues at the enterprise level, the adoption of best environmental technologies, the reduction of environmental impacts and the use of prevention systems to avoid and/or treat adequately the potential environmental hazards due to specific production activities processes. the ESCM needs to be integrated with the other managerial systems and in particular the performance measurement system. This is relevant in order to support managers in the decision-making, the evaluation of performance and to assess the efficacy and coherence of output with the strategy. In the literature ESCM and the performance measurement tend to be studied in a separate way, despite having several contact points and calls are made to study them in conjunction (Melnyk et al. 2014). The present paper aims at contributing to the extant literature through a comparative analysis of some frameworks that attempted to connect the performance measurement with the ESCM. From a methodological point of view, the paper is based on a literature review using as keywords the environmental performance management system and supply chain. Three main framework for the performance measurement ESCM, in details: the Beamon Model (1991), the Hervani et al. (2007) and the Balanced Scorecard variation proposed by Espstein and Wisner (2001). In so doing, we suggest possible commonalities and differences, arguing the need for further research to develop and understand the way companies manage the environmental performance of their supply chain