Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Environmental Impact Assessment Review journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eiar Environmental sustainability assessment in supply chain: An emerging economy context Saima Ahmed Suhi a , Rafid Enayet a , Tasmiah Haque a , Syed Mithun Ali a, ⁎ , Md. Abdul Moktadir b , Sanjoy Kumar Paul c a Department of Industrial and Production Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka 1000, Bangladesh b Institute of Leather Engineering and Technology, University of Dhaka, Dhaka 1209, Bangladesh c UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney, Australia ARTICLEINFO Keywords: Environmental sustainability Supply chain management Waste management Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) Best worst method (BWM) Emerging economy ABSTRACT Environmental sustainability is not being practiced in the supply chains of many industries. Previous studies on environmental sustainability have not outlined clear strategies to achieve sustainability across supply chains, particularly in the context of emerging economies, and have been of limited relevance in settings beyond the geographical region of their focus. To address these gaps, we have proposed a best worst method (BWM) as a framework to assess the environmental criteria for sustainability in select industries in Bangladesh. Different industrial activities or criteria affecting the environment in various ways were assessed and weighted using the BWM. To ensure the efficiency and accuracy of this framework, we sought the opinions of 34 experts to specify the most suitable indicators from our initial literature review. Findings from this study revealed that “waste management” was the most important indicator for establishing environmental sustainability in industries in Bangladesh, which was substantiated by a sensitivity analysis. This research will assist industry managers and entrepreneurs to work toward environmental sustainability across supply chains. 1. Introduction Amid technological advances in many business sectors, supply chain management (SCM) has become an important consideration for orga- nizations seeking supply chain efficiency (Beatriz et al., 2014a; Pires Ribeiro and Barbosa-Povoa, 2017; Scavarda et al., 2019). Extensive studies regarding sustainable supply chain design and management have been undertaken over the past two decades (Mitra, 2014; Ivanov, 2017). To date, theorists and practitioners of supply chain sustainability have mainly focused on reducing the environmental impacts of supply chains (Ivanov, 2017). The Brundtland Report by the World Commis- sion on Environment and Development (Nations, 1987) demonstrated the scope for supply chains to contribute to global environmental sus- tainability. During the 1990s, the Manufacturing Research Institute at Michigan State University depicted the significance of environmental cautiousness in managing sustainability in SCM (Wu et al., 2018). Sustainability denotes efficacious optimization of the processes con- sidering three sectors, i.e., environmental, social, and economic (Azevedo et al., 2019). Practitioners argue that the primary goal of environmental sus- tainability in supply chains should be to improve the environmental performance of companies without changes to productivity (Bocken et al., 2013; Parajuli et al., 2019). Product manufacturers continue to struggle with how to set, assess, and achieve sustainability goals, whether these be economic, environmental, or social (Kremer et al., 2016). Companies and academics have been involved in joint efforts to reposition the focus of SCM toward sustainability (Pires Ribeiro and Barbosa-Povoa, 2017). Minimizing environmental damage is of critical importance in today's globalized supply chains (José and Jabbour, 2013a; Ding et al., 2016). With increasing environmental problems and the failure of “treatment after pollution” strategies, business activities have accumulated significant negative externalities (Ding et al., 2015). Green SCM has been developed to integrate environmental thinking in SCM (Chin et al., 2015). Companies are inaugurating environmental training to make internal employees, stakeholders, and customers aware of the significance of green SCM (José and Jabbour, 2013b; Beatriz et al., 2014b). (Ahi and Searcy, 2015; Acquaye et al., 2017a) reported on the need for the performance measurement of supply chain sustainability given opportunities for continuous improvement. Several models have been developed to measure the environmental perfor- mance of organizations' SCM because a large component of sustain- ability depends on environmental activities (Koberg and Longoni, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2019.106306 Received 6 May 2019; Received in revised form 7 August 2019; Accepted 20 August 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: syed.mithun@gmail.com (S.M. Ali), sanjoy.paul@uts.edu.au (S.K. Paul). Environmental Impact Assessment Review 79 (2019) 106306 0195-9255/ © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. T