A Strategic Sustainability Justification Methodology for Organisational Decisions: A Reverse Logistics Illustration

The concept of sustainability has become increasingly important for organisations and has permeated a number of managerial and organisational decisions. Sustainability, as defined by its 'triple-bottom line' factors of economic, environmental, and social dimensions, is the underlying framework we use to develop and apply a strategic justification tool for project evaluation with sustainability implications. An activity based management methodological framework is used as a vehicle to frame decisions using corporate sustainability. An illustrative application of this technique demonstrates how an organisation could select between two competing reverse logistics providers. This process requires that we introduce issues relevant to three major sustainability factors (and their sub factors) and how they are influenced by a reverse logistics provider decision. The dual contribution of this paper includes investigating the design and development of the strategic sustainability evaluation framework and introducing the relationships of reverse logistics to economic, environmental and social sustainability dimensions.