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Product returns in retail are inherently wasteful and have considerable negative environmental impacts. Besides the monetary costs, they lead to increased transportation, packaging and processing, and the returned items are often discarded. We present strategies and practices retailers can adopt to manage their product returns in a way that reduces environmental impacts. With eCommerce flourishing, product returns have increased significantly. Whilst highest for online sales, they are a challenge across all channels. The importance of developing sustainability management in operations and supply chains is evident from the growing body of literature, but there is a gap regarding the management of product returns in a more environmentally sustainable manner. To address this gap, we interviewed multichannel retailers, retail experts and return service providers operating in the UK and North America. The findings reveal that although retailers have started paying attention to the financial impact of returns, there is little awareness of the scale of environmental impacts. In addition, retailers lack a comprehensive approach to addressing the environmental impact of product returns. Based on our findings, we (1) unpack the barriers inhibiting retailers from developing environmental sustainability plans in returns management, (2) present a set of strategies for retailers to reduce the environmental impact of returns and (3) develop a framework for environmental sustainability in returns management. Our findings and proposed framework have implications for research and practice on addressing the environmental impact of product returns.

Waste management of non-household end-use plastic waste receives considerably less attention compared to household waste. This article develops and applies a cost-benefit analysis model to develop potential business cases for selective collection and mechanical recycling scenarios of non-household end-use plastic film waste from urban areas considering the City of Ghent in Belgium and twelve municipalities nearby as a case study. Three different collection frequencies (weekly, fortnightly, monthly) and two different mechanical recycling plant layouts (basic and advanced configuration) are considered. Data on waste quantity, composition, and economic parameters are collected from real sampling from urban areas combined with information from literature. In the most favorable scenarios, results show that the annual costs of collecting and recycling are estimated to be in the range of €635–€1,445/tonne output, depending on the collection frequencies and plant configurations. Mechanical recycling yields 48–77 regranulates, depending on the plant configuration and feedstock quality. Scale is essential for plastic recycling plantsdevelopment; a positive net economic balance (ranging from €5–€537/tonne output) is achieved when at least 10,500 tonnes/year of waste is collected (fortnightly or monthly) and processed. The recycling systems become economically more effective as the processing capacity increases. It is imperative to maintain high feedstock quality as the recycling systems become economically less favorable when the residue content in the collected plastic film waste exceeds 30–35. A greenhouse gas emissions calculation indicates minimizing residue and promoting high-quality feedstock from collected waste are the key to increasing the carbon footprint savings of recycling.

Within the scope of PlastiCity, an Interreg2Seas project (2019-2022), a set of scenarios were developedfor the collection of plastic waste in the urban environments of Ghent (Belgium), Douai (France), TheHague (The Netherlands), and Southend-on-Sea (UK). This included the exploration of alternativevehicles like CargoBikes and electro-vans, in comparison to conventional diesel-powered refusecollection vehicles. For each city, we developed an individual scenario and executed optimisations tocompare different collection strategies and frequencies in terms of distance travelled, time used, as wellas costs and emissions generated. We used OptiFlow, a logistics optimisation software made availableby Conundra, a startup from Ghent University. The main challenge was the unavailability of realisticdata on plastic waste volumes for different types of small and medium businesses and organisations inthese urban environments, which was at least partially due to pandemic restrictions. Thus, our modellingis mostly to be understood as ways to explore different scenarios and constraints, such as a very limitedloading capacity on CargoBikes.

This book contains a collection of studies on the interactions between businesses in Africa and Global Value Chains (GVCs) in terms of social, environmental and economic sustainability. This is particularly pertinent given the asymmetrical power distribution between the global buyer and the African supplier, their governance relationships and the ongoing competitive pressures to reduce costs and increase flexibility to meet GVC demands. Rather than focusing on the sustainability of a single organization, GVCs address the sustainability of inter-firm value chains and global industries as a whole. With little differentiation between value chain creation and social / environmental degradation extending to people and raw material extraction (upstream) and disposal or recycling (downstream), sustainability issues need to be at the forefront of African business research interests. Nowadays, sustainability is considered a competitive advantage for a firm looking to join a GVC. Whether sustainability is approached from the viewpoint of an exporting firm motivated to join a GVC in its respective industry or whether a firm’s continuing contractual or collaborative relationship with a buyer depends on its compliance with sustainability standards, both approaches focus on the ability of firms in Africa to benefit from joining sustainable GVCs.

An increasing percentage of products in multichannel retail are being returned, yet many retailers and manufacturers are not aware of the importance and scale of this issue. Similarly, the literature on online returns is limited. Returns processes can be very complicated, contain many manual steps that have several variations, unclear decision-making rules and, at the handling stage, often involve low-wage third-party employees guided by patchy IT systems. This article maps the complexity of product returns processes, highlights challenges and identifies opportunities for improvement, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of the emerging field of product returns research. It also concludes that it is essential for returns to be made a strategic priority at the senior management level, implementing a Lean approach to returns systems. The research was based on 4 case studies, 17 structured interviews and 3 retail community workshops, all with British and other Western European retailers. Through triangulation of individual data, a generic process map for retail returns was created and implications for sustainability, loss prevention and profit optimisation are examined.

Fraudulent returns are seen as a misfortune for most retailers because it reduces sales and induce greater costs and challenges in returns management. While extant research suggests one of the causes is retailers’ liberal return policies and that retailers should restrict their policies, there is no study systematically exploring the impacts of various return policies and fraud interventions on reducing different types of fraudulent behaviour and the costs and benefits of associated interventions. In this paper, we first undertook semi-structured interviews with retailers in the UK and North America to gain insights into their fraud intervention strategies, as well as conducted literature review on fraudulent returns to identify the influential factors that lead customers to return products fraudulently. On this basis, we developed a simulation model to help retailers forecast fraudulent returns and explore how different combinations of interventions might affect the cases of fraudulent returns and associated financial impacts on profitability. The background literature on fraudulent returns, the findings of interviews, and the demonstration and implications of the model on reducing fraudulent returns and related financial impacts are discussed. Our model allows retailers to make cost- effective evaluations and adopt their fraud prevention strategies effectively based on their business models.

Product returns are harmful to the environment due to increased transportation, waste and emissions (Frei et al., 2020). Whilst literature recognises the importance of sustainability in operations and supply chains, there is limited research on the environmental impact of returns and retailers’ views on sustainability in returns. To address these gaps, the first phase of this research consisted of a review of academic and other publications (e.g., blogs and reports by reverse logistics companies) to gain a comprehensive picture of the current product returns sustainability research and practice. The second phase was to undertake semi-structured interviews with retailers in the UK and Canada. We also participated in member sessions with the Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) Retail Loss Group to learn about the risks of implementing a sustainability strategy in returns under uncertain conditions in a pandemic world. The results from our first phase indicate that most sustainability studies to date excluded the analysis of returns (e.g., Mangiaracina et al., 2015). Although environmental assessment methods, such as Material flow analysis and Life-cycle assessment (Withanage and Habib, 2021), can assist practitioners in making more sustainable decisions in their forward supply chains, no study has proposed a systematic evaluation of the environmental impacts of reverse supply chains. Future research should assess this to help reduce the ecological damage caused by returns. The interviews conducted in the second phase revealed that retailers have only recently started paying attention to the returns’ financial impact. Many commented that they have not gained enough experience yet to manage returns sustainably. This is exacerbated by the lack of data and communications on returns’ costs and wastes ecologically. Additionally, the reverse logistics on returned products need further sustainable development. The scientific understanding of returns and their degrees of (un-)su

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected customers' shopping and returns behaviour and significantly aggravated the problem of high product returns rates and returns fraud. Measures for public health and safety resulted in retailers modifying their returns processes. The effects of these changes on returns management are unclear; very little is known about what retailers have experienced in terms of product returns during the pandemic. This paper addresses this research gap via a series of semi-structured interviews and a consumer survey. Our findings include a list of recommendations for retailers to mitigate the effects of the pandemic on returns and related fraud.

Irish fast-fashion retailer Primark has no plans to sell its clothes online. This is despite the company warning that lockdown store closures could cost it losses of more than £1 billion. The retailer has shut 305 of its 389 global stores – including 190 in the UK. Primark has just announced a 30 sales fall to £2 billion in the 16 weeks leading to January 2, adding that this loss could mean price rises.

With the rise in online purchases, returns polices have become more lenient to maximise sales, leading to increased product returns. This results in considerable costs to businesses due to complex returns systems, and environmental costs due to unnecessary transportation and waste. Unsustainable consumption poses a threat to our environment, and access-based business models whereby products are borrowed/rented rather than purchased have been proposed as a way to align customer needs, business success, and sustainability. Product returns often constitute a form of informal or illegitimate borrowing, as goods are bought with the intention of being returned. In this discussion paper we propose that, instead of being viewed as a threat to business, issues with high product returns could be seen as an opportunity to switch to an access-based model. As product returns escalate, businesses will need to invest substantially in their reverse supply chains. We propose that a more strategic approach might be to leapfrog the costly stage of developing more efficient returns systems, and move straight to formalising product returns as the new normal for those goods that would best suit an access-based model, so that processes are streamlined around borrowing and returning rather than around sales.

The percentage of products being returned in multichannel retail are high and further increasing, yet many retailers and manufacturers are unaware of the importance and scale of this issue. They consider dealing with returns as a cost of doing business and are oblivious of the potential for conflicts between their corporate social responsibility commitments and their returns practices. This article investigates how far sustainable practices and circular economy concepts have been implemented in retail returns systems; it identifies vulnerabilities, barriers, and challenges to the implementation of sustainable, circular practices and suggests ways to overcome them, as sustainability, loss prevention, and profit optimisation can go hand in hand with the right approach to the organisation of the reverse supply chain. Implications of this research on strategic management are outlined. The research was conducted using in‐depth interviews and observations with four major retailers in the United Kingdom, 17 structured interviews, 100 retailer website reviews, and three retail community workshops, all with British and other European retailers.

One of aims of manufacturing quality control is to ensure that products are made free from defects according to specifications without unnecessarily increasing time and cost of production. Over-control of a process can be as detrimental to a manufacturer as under-control. It is common in industry that operators use their personal knowhow and intuition to decide where to implement process verification, and where to tighten it when processes are not meeting specifications. This is partially because there is little scientific guidance that can assist operators in making a decision on levels of quality control of a process at varying stages. To remedy this, a new method for manufacturing quality control, namely Error Chain Analysis (ECA), is introduced and its application is illustrated in this article. ECA is capable of statistically analysing the quality of a multi-stage manufacturing process based on existing control measures, and it enables to indicate where added or tighter control may need to be effectively implemented. For testing its applicability, ECA was built into a user-friendly tool that was subsequently used to analyse data gathered from a large manufacturing company in the UK.

Internet shopping has grown massively, especially now that free delivery and returns, with multiple ways of making them, are the norm. You can order a number of variations of the same piece of clothing, for example, and then just send back the unwanted ones.

This book presents a collection of studies on current best practices for delivering sustainable development policies within supply chains. It critiques the limitations of existing business theory and practice on sustainable supply chain management, and discusses opportunities for new conceptual models for businesses to engage with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It examines how businesses can work towards implementing Sustainable Development Goals in the contexts of entrepreneurial initiative, industry collaboration and regional development. SDGs renew the sustainable development agenda for global communities and ask businesses and organisations to reset their sustainable development policies. A strategy to embed sustainable development principles into business operations along the supply chain operations, which has been a conceptual and, in many instances, practitioner, business and industry achievement of the past decades, is not enough to shift the economic and social conditions of poor populations around the world. How would the global supply chains of the future look like? What social relations does it envisage? How will businesses and organisations engage with societies, environments and complex institutional contexts in emerging markets and developing countries, which are faced with issues of population growth, needed leaps in infrastructure provision, educational and health improvements, cultural and institutional shifts? The books challenges current approaches to sustainable supply chain practices guided by discussion on SDGs. It reviews implementation issues of existing sustainable development approaches, assesses the advancement of sustainable development strategies and examines the opportunities for global value chains to increase their positive social and environmental inputs in regions, communities and organisations. The book collects both conceptual and empirical studies set in a variety of business and organisationalcontexts, such as manufactur

Thoracican barnacles of the Superorder Thoracicalcarea Gale, 2016 are sessile calcifiers which are ubiquitous in the intertidal zone and present from very shallow to the deepest marine environments; they also live as epiplankton on animals and detritus. The geochemical composition of their shell calcite has been shown to yield information about environmental conditions, but comprehensive analyses of barnacle shell geochemistry are so far lacking. Here, a dataset is reported for Mg/Ca, Sr/Ca, Mn/Ca, Fe/Ca, as well as carbon and oxygen isotope ratios for 42 species from the Balaniformes, Verruciformes, Scalpelliformes and Lepadiformes. Barnacles predominantly form low-Mg-calcite with very high Sr/Ca ratios averaging 4.2 mmol/mol. The Mn/Ca and Fe/Ca ratios in shell plates are variable and can exceed >4 mmol/mol in barnacles that are attached to manmade structures or live close to (anthropogenic) sources of Mn and Fe. No strong phylogenetic control on the average element/Ca ratios is observed in barnacles. The Balaniformes show a ca. 40 enrichment of Mg in their scuta and terga as compared to other shell plates-a pattern which is not seen in other barnacles. The combination of low to medium Mg/Ca ratios and high Sr/Ca ratios is rare for marine biogenic calcite. Barnacles may thus become important for robustly reconstructing past seawater composition, if this signature is also present in fossil barnacle calcite and can be used alongside other fossil taxa with different Sr incorporation behaviour. Carbon and oxygen isotope data support the view that the oxygen isotope thermometer for barnacles is robust and that most barnacle species form their calcite near isotopic equilibrium with ambient water. The Lepadiformes, however, show a tendency for strong co-variation of delta (super 13) C with delta (super 18) O values and depletion in (super 13) C and (super 18) O which is attributed to isotopic disequilibrium during shell secretion. Strong systematic fluctuations in Mg/Ca

Reverse supply chains take a variety of forms, depending on the nature of the product, the business model, the stakeholders and other factors. This article will contribute to a better understanding of how different types of reverse supply chains function, how they can be modelled and their performance assessed. The research is based on a semi-structured approach using case studies, interviews and qualitative analysis. A generic RSC model is suggested in conjunction with an analysis of circumstances and factors of influence, with the intention to trigger further investigation. A better understanding of RSC may lead to more companies engaging in returning products and materials to the process of usefulness suggested by the Circular Economy concept, hence leading to a more sustainable way of running manufacturing businesses.

The term Conformal Printing refers to 3D printing onto uneven surfaces. Whilst some very high priced solutions exist for known uneven surfaces, where the toolpath is generated in advance, based on CAD data of the object to be printed onto, there is nothing available yet for conformal printing onto unknown uneven surfaces that are scanned on-the-fly. A low-cost prototype named 'InSPIREd' was recently developed to achieve this, made possible with a combination of multi-disciplinary expertise, ingenuity and problem tackling know how, and the latest improvements are presented in this paper. The prototype now includes more capable scanning technology and a simplified calibration procedure.

Increasing attention has been given to the reverse supply chain because of the increasing value of products and technology at the end of direct supply chains as well as the impact of new green legislation. Design strategies for reverse supply chains have remained relatively unexplored and underdeveloped. Meanwhile measuring supply chain performance has also become important as understanding, collaboration and integration has increased between supply chain members. It has also helped companies to target profitable market segments or identify areas for service improvement. This paper will focus on measuring performance of reverse supply chains in carpet manufacturers. A simple general framework of the company is presented as well as mathematical models. This simple general model can be to be applied by small medium enterprises to optimise their reverse supply chain systems.

The enthusiasm for 3D printing is quickly spreading around the world. Technological advances in 3D printing and other techniques initially intended for rapid prototyping make it possible to produce sophisticated parts with relatively simple means. While it gives people the possibility to fabricate sophisticated objects by themselves, it comes with challenges and considerable drawbacks. 3D printers using recycled materials are still rare, and the rubbish island swimming in the Oceans is growing fast. Additive manufacturing leads to a change in the manufacturing world involving technology and society. With the integration of 3D scanning, virtual design worlds, and 3D printing, the separation between the physical and virtual worlds gradually vanishes. Being able to produce almost anything anywhere and at any time will lead to changes in the way industrial manufacturing and supply chains work – reducing transportation but also efficiency. People will increasingly produce things at home or in local manufacturing communities, using both original and self-made designs. This has implications for the environment, intellectual property laws, the economy and other aspects like safety and security. This article analyses the trend towards personal manufacturing and its many implications. Sketching a socio-technical model of this emerging system, it makes preliminary recommendations for regulating policies.

A Circular Economy Handbook for Business and Supply Chains is an easily digestible and comprehensive handbook that provides a clear guide to the circular economy, helping the reader create future-fit, sustainable strategies. Real examples across a range of market sectors help businesses, students and policymakers understand the theory and fast-developing practice of the circular economy. To help the reader generate ideas, A Circular Economy Handbook for Business and Supply Chains provides a holistic framework for the design and supply chain and supporting business models, and includes tools the reader can use to get started. Whilst growing global consumption presents fantastic business opportunities, our current linear systems (take some materials, make a product, use it and then throw it away) are not fit for purpose. The circular economy unlocks this problem by decoupling resources from consumption. Engaged businesses are re-thinking product design, material choices, business models and supply chains. A Circular Economy Handbook for Business and Supply Chains is a must-read for anyone who wants to apply the circular economy today. Online resources now available: PowerPoint slides of figures and tables from every chapter created by the author.

Globalised trade and pressure on resources require supply chains to become more sustainable, which includes the need for material flows to become closed loops. Reverse Supply Chains (RSC) recover parts and products from end customers or any other stage of the supply chain and feeds them back into the supply network for reuse, remanufacturing, recycling or proper disposal. In thisway, RSCs contribute to manufacturing becoming more sustainable ecologically, economically and socially. However, most companies are unaware of their RSC and therefore miss out on beneficial opportunities. This paper explores the current situation in industry and refers to relevant literature. A first version of an RSC framework is suggested, together with examples and discussion.