Appropriate location for remanufacturing plant towards sustainable supply chain

Abstract

© 2019 The Author(s). Confronted with the scarcity of natural resources, increase in product returns and government regulations on protection of environment, firms are implementing remanufacturing operations to achieve growth which is more sustainable and contribute to the millennium sustainable development goals. The challenge before the managers is to decide the appropriate location to establish the remanufacturing facilities in the reverse supply chain. Several conflicting criteria need to be considered before establishing a remanufacturing facility. In this paper, a framework is proposed to evaluate an ideal location for opening a remanufacturing plant, with the aid of ideal solution based multi criteria decision making (MCDM) tools, specifically TOPSIS, GRA and VIKOR. The suitable candidate location is then selected using the veto rule, which helps to overcome the limitation of using a single MCDM tool. An illustrative application in the Indian automotive sector is demonstrated to show the applicability of proposed framework. The approach is useful when there is a lack of quantitative data or the information is incomplete. The developed framework will help industries and economies to impact the use of eco-efficient and socio-economic systems and suggest pathways of transitioning to a more sustainable future.