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The Integrated Supply Chain at Xerox Ltd is a large complex organisation which has many potential impacts on the environment. In order to better understand and reduce those impacts, an environmental bias has been introduced into the decision making process which allows more environmentally conscious decisions to be made. This paper details how the environmental bias was developed and how it can be used to provide both a measure of environmental performance for the whole supply chain, each functional element within the chain and for different product delivery scenarios. The environmental decision making tool construction is discussed and preliminary results show that it is the working life of a typical product which causes the biggest environmental impact.

Although there has been considerable effort placed on measuring supply chains in order to assess their performance, these techniques have been found to be time and cost focused, aimed at coping with rapid change. This approach tends to have a short‐term outlook. Work on greening supply chains is much longer‐term in outlook. Is information intensive and biased towards the supply side? These two mindsets appear to be diverging, developing in conflicting directions. This is an alarming prospect for the environment, which has no place in future supply chain performance measurements, thus running the risk of being increasingly side‐lined; and for performance measurements, which is unconcerned with longer‐term sustainability in terms of the environment. The case is made to amalgamate the advantages of both schools of thought to allow long‐term views to be represented by short‐term performance measurement.

The majority of the environmental impacts in a typical supply chain can arise beyond the focal firm boundaries. However, no standardised method to quantify these impacts at the supply chain level currently exists. The purpose of this paper is to identify the quantitative methods developed to measure the environmental performance of supply chains and evaluate their key features.

A systematic literature review is conducted at the intersection of performance measurement and green supply chain management (GSCM) fields, covering 78 publications in peer-reviewed academic journals. The literature is reviewed according to several perspectives, including the environmental aspects considered, the main purpose of measurement, model types and the extent of supply chain covered by performance measurements.

Adopted environmental metrics show a low degree of standardisation and focus on natural resources, energy and emissions to air. The visibility and traceability of environmental aspects are still limited; the assessment of environmental impacts does not span in most cases beyond the direct business partners of the focal firms. A trade-off was observed between the range of environmental aspects and the extent of the supply chain considered with no method suitable for a holistic evaluation of the environmental supply chain performance identified. Three major streams of research developing in the field are identified, based on different scope.

This paper is the first attempt to examine in detail what tiers of the supply chain are actually involved in green performance assessment, ultimately contributing to clarify the scope of the supply chain dimension in GSCM performance measurement research. The work also recognises which methods are applicable to extended supply chains and explores how different methodologies perform in terms of supply chain extent covered.