Reverse – Green Virtual Enterprises and Their Breeding Environments: Closed-Loop Networks

Part 20: Sustainable Collaborative Networks IInternational audienceGreen Virtual Enterprise Breeding Environments and their Reverse-Green Virtual Enterprises, as dynamic reverse supply networks, represent a promising paradigm to face the reverse logistics and end-of-life manufacturing challenges towards closed-loop industrial processes, closed-loop supply networks and sustainable industrial development models. This paper explores different collaborative product recovery business opportunities and strategies for capturing current missed value at the end-of-lifecycle with new activities, relationships and network configurations, put forward based on the disciplines of Industrial Ecology, Collaborative Networks and Lifecycle Management

Reverse Logistics: Overview and Challenges for Supply Chain Management

This paper is aimed at introducing the concept of reverse logistics (RL) and its implications for supply chain management (SCM). RL is a research area focused on the management of the recovery of products once they are no longer desired (end-of-use products, EoU) or can no longer be used (end-of-life products) by the consumers, in order to obtain an economic value from the recovered products. This way, RL has become a matter of strategic importance, an element that companies are considering in their decision-making processes related to the design and development of their supply chains. In addition, a description of the implications of RL for SCM will be discussed and, finally, an analysis of some of the opportunities and challenges that RL implies for SCM will be presented