Green Supply Chain - Malaysian Practice

With the increasing awareness of the consumers about environmental issues, businesses, households and governments increasingly want to buy green products. Therefore, firms need to implement strategies to reduce environmental impacts of their products and services (Lewis and Gretsakis, 2001; Sarkis, 1995; Sarkis and Cordeiro, 2001). According to Hansmann and Claudia (2001), success in addressing environmental items may provide new opportunity for competition and new ways to add value to core business programs. Therefore, market leaders in various industries have taken a step ahead to green their internal operation through ISO14000 certification. According to Handfield et al. (2005), the ISO 14000 principle provides framework, which guiding firms to implement EMS to improve environment performance only within the firm’s operation boundaries instead of through the supply chain. Therefore, by getting its own internal operation to be certified ISO14000 is only the first step but it does not ensure the whole supply chain is participating in green supply chain initiative. That shows that there are still a big gap between ISO14000 and green supply chain initiative. Who should take the responsibility and initiative to ensure the whole industry is practicing green initiative to reduce environmental impact? Is that the market leader, government or consumers’ responsibility? Hence, this study will look into the barriers that affecting SMEs to participate in green supply chain initiative in the local context.
As the global climate has changed rapidly due to global warming, manufacturing and production process are viewed as the culprits in harming the environment, in the form of waste generation, ecosystem disruption and depletion of natural resources (Fiksel, 1996). It is necessary for the industry to react and transform the way production systems operate towards sustainability. It can be achieved by extending the structure of the current one way supply chain to a closed loop,