Introducing the environmental profile of green supply chains to assess their environmental capability

Environmental assessment of supply chains is a key research field to provide organisations the opportunity of identifying improvements and measuring the effect of investments in greening products and processes. The focus on supply chain management is growing as a leverage to compete in global markets and handle the always more pressing environmental regulations. The paper describes a study to create an innovative framework to assess the ecological profile of a supply chain, considering existing relations with eco-design principles and a set of legislation requirements along the life-cycle of products. The study considers the case of a domestic dishwasher to verify the capacity and the applicability of the framework and provide a tool to support organisations with a new eco-design tool to evaluate the potential capability of ecological improvements.