Sustainability in paper industry closed-loop supply chain (case study: East Azerbaijan province, Iran)

Abstract

Governments and customers are forcing the paper manufacturers to become more sustainable. Accordingly, there still exists a gap in the quantitative modeling of these issues. In this paper, this gap is covered through simultaneously considering economical, environmental and social impacts in the paper closed-loop supply chain network design. The proposed multi-objective, multi-echelon, multi-product and single-period model is composed of suppliers, plants, regional wholesalers, retailers, customer zones, collection sites, centralized collection points, recycling facilities, energy recovery and disposal centers.The objectives considered are minimization of total cost; environmental benefit through maximizing coverage of collected waste paper by opened centralized collection centers; and maximization of the social impact of the network in a way that would prefer the location of facilities in the less populated regions.The proposed model is applied to an illustrative example designed utilizing real data of the paper industry in East Azerbaijan of Iran and interactive fuzzy goal programming approach is used to solve the developed model. Sensitivity analysis of the proposed model is also performed by considering key parameters.