Developing a conceptual model to evaluate green suppliers: Decision making method using DEMATEL

Nowadays stakeholder pressure and public awareness have been raised against companies‟ environmental impacts, so green supply chain management (GSCM) seems vital for companies‟ environmental compliance and business growth. Companies continuously seek novel ideas and methods enabling them to obtain and/or maintain environmental sustainability. Greening the supply chain is one of such innovative idea involving all of the business value-adding operations, comprising purchasing and in-bound logistics, production and manufacturing, distribution, out-bound logistics and collaboration with patrons and suppliers in a way that has the least negative environmental effect. The main objective of the present study is finding interrelationship between green supplier criteria. For this to happen, we investigated experts‟ opinions through nominal group technique (NGT) to find out the interrelationship and causal preferences of the green supplier evaluation aspects using Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method. A numerical example demonstrates the application of the proposed model.