Sustainable approach for third-party reverse logistics provider selection
Résumé
Nowadays many organizations outsource reverse logistics activities to third party providers (3PRLP) as a strategy. Selecting the most efficient 3PRLP becomes a critical task for these organizations. One of the most important issues of this decision is to select the most appropriate criteria which may include different qualitative and quantitative ones. Due to legalizations, economic interests, and social responsibility, it is important to take into account environmental and social criteria as well as economic criteria in the provider selection process. The majority of the present models of 3PRL provider selection focuses on economic and slightly on environmental factors. The social aspect and the tie between all three dimensions of sustainability in 3PRLP selection problem have been almost neglected. This article addresses the issue of 3PRLP evaluation and selection, and proposes a new sustainable approach which presents an integrated criteria list followed by sets of sub-criteria. Hence, the main purpose of this paper is to identify and classify key criteria for selecting a suitable reverse logistics provider in the context of sustainability.