Green Supply Chain Management Practices for Green Innovation

Abstract

Green supply chains are crucial for environmental performance, encouraging companies to rapidly adopt Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) practices that formalize environmental priorities across sourcing, operations, logistics, and recovery. Although recent research on the relationship between GSCM and green innovation has grown, it remains somewhat fragmented. This paper offers a supply chain–focused conceptual synthesis of GSCM practices to promote green innovation. It reviews both foundational and recent studies, highlighting five key GSCM practices: green purchasing, supplier collaboration, eco-design, reverse logistics, and internal environmental management. It shows how these practices enable the development of green products, processes, and organizational innovations. The review indicates that green innovation is most strongly associated with GSCM when these practices operate as an integrated system. Specifically, upstream governance and collaboration generate environmental knowledge; eco-design turns environmental goals into innovative product structures; reverse logistics supports closed-loop learning and process improvements; and internal environmental management provides cross-functional alignment and governance to sustain innovation. This study advances the logistics and supply chain literature by conceptually integrating key GSCM practices into a unified system that fosters multidimensional green innovation throughout the supply chain.