Green Supplier Evaluation and Selection: An Updated Literature Review

Green supply chain management is concerned with the integration of environmental criteria and sustainability issues in the management of the supply chain. Within this framework, firms applying internally green strategy have, naturally, the interest to pressure purchases of goods and services from suppliers that are themselves green, at least to a certain extent. Thus, Supplier Evaluation and Selection is crucial due to its big impact on business function. The prospect of applying green principles has consequently become an important feature of a supplier’s overall performance. Hence, green supplier selection and evaluation, although a relatively new research subject, has grown quite rapidly. It develops and studies the decision and evaluation models based on environmental criteria. Its main tools are based on multi-criteria decision making approaches. Our objective, in this paper, is to review journal articles published in the period 2012–2019 on this topic, in order to identify the most widely applied approaches for green supplier evaluation and selection and the most cited green criteria. Our research methodology in inducing the present review has been based on several criteria for the selection of the appropriate articles relevant to the subject. The analysis of those papers has led to an extended classification with respect to the multi-criteria decision making approaches, as well as with respect to the adopted green criteria. We conclude that the majority of applied approaches are based on integrated fuzzy models and that the most popular criteria are “Environmental management system” and “Green design”.