A Methodology for Green Supplier Selection in Food Industries - Technology Management for Sustainable Production and Logistics - page 7

Collecting the relevant criteria help the decision maker to realize the effective
items in both conventional and green supplier selection. Having the most relevant
criteria makes decision making more precise and easier.
2.3 Supplier Selection in Packaging and Food Industries
Kumar et al. ( 2011 ) studied supplier selection process for food packaging, and
combined closed loop supplier selection modeling framework and the total cost of
ownership model in the selection of low-cost packaging material. Although they
didn't note environmental criteria in packaging supplier selection but considered
risk of disruption, volume and product flexibility and innovation as specific crite-
ria for PMS selection. Also Magdalena ( 2012 ) studied green packaging supplier
selection of food industry focusing on limited criteria and using combination of
Taguchi loss function and fuzzy AHP techniques. He considered four criteria of
quality, delivery, completeness and environmental management in terms of cost.
Cost based models convert every criterion based solely on price which is some-
times impossible for qualitative criteria; the buyer-supplier relationships based
solely on price criterion are no longer applicable.
Vachon and Klassen ( 2006 ) examined the impact of environment-related inter-
actions in the supply chain of the Canadian and United States package printing
industry on operational performance. The results indicate that green project part-
nership with customers in package industry was positively linked to quality, flex-
ibility and environmental performance. The literature shows that there are few
studies on supplier selection of packaging and food industries which most of them
overlooked environmental and sustainability issues in supplier selection process.
Therefore it is necessary to focus on GSS in food industry.
The area of criteria selection is not well investigated. There are some gaps and
overlaps in considered criteria of the literature. Any changes in government policy,
market development and customer preferences will change the criteria for supplier
selection (Igrashi et al. 2013 ). It is necessary to develop methods which effectively
link the issue of criteria selection and supplier selection. Previous studies insist on
fixed and limited criteria for supplier selection, but the proposed methodology in this
chapter is flexible and before starting supplier selection process allows the decision
makers for candida ting, ranking and choosing criteria for supplier selection.
2.4 Method Selection for Green Supplier Selection
According to literature review, there are many methods for supplier selection but
AHP, TOPSIS and GRA are the most relevant methods in supplier selection due
to broad set of applications, intuitive and easy to use (Chai et al. 2013 ; Govindan
et al. 2013 ).