Circular Supply Chain Network Design for E-commerce

Abstract

There is a growing attention to circular economy through researchers, enterprises and governments. The idea of circular economy is to give no harm to environment while using material till the end of its life and keeping it as much as possible in the cycle. From this point of view, to keep the material in cycle might be possible with a well-designed logistics infrastructure. In this study, the small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) that make sales through e-commerce and the way of handling returns are brought forward. A case study is created for footware industry in Istanbul and a circular supply chain network design is proposed. Afterwards, a linear programming is applied to minimize cost. This study gives a clear and simple solution for SMEs to minimize the cost for handling returns while keeping them in the cycle.

Keywords

• Circular economy
• Network design
• E-commerce
• Linear programming

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