Editorial

摘要

Historically, profitability and efficiency, and more recently, customer satisfaction, quality and responsiveness, have been the dominant concern for organisations (Green et al., 2012; Mohanty and Deshmukh, 1999). In this line, "Lean" and "Six Sigma" have been recognised as the two most prominent strategies used by organisations to attain operational excellence and thus achieve the aforementioned objectives. However, to respond to environmental regulations and the growth of customer demands for products and services that are more environmentally sustainable, companies have now been forced to rethink their objectives and how they manage their operations and processes (Garza-Reyes, 2015a). Instead of seeing things from the perspective of the customer, companies are now learning to see from the perspective of the environment (Wills, 2009). For this reason, some organisations have taken a proactive role in developing cleaner supply chains, manufacturing processes and services as well as designing environmentally sustainable products. This has given birth to the emergence of the "green paradigm" as a philosophy and operational approach to improve the environmental efficiency of organisations and reduce the negative ecological impact of their products and services while still achieving their financial objectives (Garza-Reyes, 2015b). The green paradigm can be considered an initiative (Digalwar et aL, 2013) that uses methods such as environmental operations management, also known as green operations (Nunes and Bennett, 2010), reverse logistics (Sarkis, 2003), green supply chains (Sarkis, 2012), green manufacturing (Kleindorfer et aL, 2005), among others, to reduce the negative environmental effect of the consumption and production of products and services (Garza-Reyes, 2015b).