A strategic sustainability justification methodology for organizational decisions: the case of reverse logistics

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 around using corporate sustainability. An illustrative application of this technique investigates how an organisation would select from one of 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 the linkage of reverse logistics to economic, environmental and social sustainability dimensions.