When the best packaging is no packaging

This paper aims to describe how an Italian retail chain was able to involve customers in a sustainability conscious supply chain. The research focuses on the scheme to reduce packaging which encouraged customers purchase loose products by weight. Green supply chain management is attracting considerable attention in both the academic and business worlds. It is defined as integrating environmental thinking into supply chain management, and includes aspects of green design (i.e. Life-cycle assessment and environmental conscious design) and green operations (Srivastava 2007). The operations consist of remanufacturing, reverse logistics, and waste management. Reverse logistics means the reverse flow of products from consumers to suppliers. Used products, for example, can return from consumers to retailers for recycling and remanufacturing, and retailers are required to reduce disposal and collect used products in recycle-oriented supply chains. However, collecting returned products from consumers is time consuming. The problem is how retailers should manage waste and reverse logistics with their customers