Regulated closed-loop supply chains for climate change mitigation: interplays of policies, strategies, and sustainability impacts

Climate change is an urgent challenge, which requires solutions from a paradigm shift to sustainable closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) operations. To achieve best results, governments play a central role. In this paper, we aim to review diverse perspectives and provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of CLSCs under government intervention, referred as regulated CLSCs (R-CLSCs). We build a novel taxonomy on regulated CLSCs, which includes problem characteristics, covering “scenarios”, “government intervention” and “impact”. We highlight their relevance to sustainability and climate change mitigation. Based on the reviewed results, we identify various research gaps, propose pertinent directions for further studies and establish the future research agendas with important research questions. This paper lays the foundation for studies on regulated CLSCs with a focus on the interplays of policies, strategies and sustainability impacts.