Operational Implications of Environmental Regulation

Environmental regulation has important implications on the design and operation of sustainable supply chains. In particular, driving supply chains towards environmental sustainability heavily depends on how such regulation is implemented. To realize a simple regulative principle, different implementation choices may be available to regulators, and these choices can generate very different incentives on different stakeholders and how they operationalize sustainability. In this chapter, we review a number of recent research papers to illustrate this phenomenon in the context of take-back regulation and posit that looking through an operational lens should be an essential component of designing and coping with environmental regulation.