Economic Impacts of Closed-Loop Supply Chains

Abstract

Closed-loop supply chain management has begun to gain more importance in recent years due to increased environmental concerns, reduced natural resources, and legal regulations. In addition, with the shortening of product life cycles, the rate of returning products is increasing day by day. Therefore, businesses are trying to find ways to get more value from these returning products. Here, the closed-loop supply chain (CLSC), which comes into effect at this point, refers to the design, operation, and control of the system to ensure maximum value from returning products of different breeds and quantities. Recycling these returned products by different methods will provide significant savings in terms of both the production costs by providing return of the economically valuable materials to the economy as an input and the waste disposal costs by reducing the amount of waste. This chapter investigates the concept of closed-loop supply chain and its benefits to the businesses.