Sustainable supply chain network design.

Nowadays, there is a great of interest in supply chains, production and operations systems based on the sustainable development goals. In this special issue entitled “Sustainable Supply Chain Network Design” of the journal of Environmental Science and Pollution Research, we received many papers in the areas of facility location, production scheduling, inventory and stock levels and capacities, supply and delivery channels, transportation mode and routing activities, etc. from September 1, 2020, to December 31, 2020. In particular, more than 57 submissions were evaluated, and most of these submissions fell into the aforementioned research areas of the special issue. Among them, 20 papers were accepted for publication in this journal after the required revisions were made by the authors (i.e., the average acceptance rate was 35%).

Due to importance of Supply Chain Network Design (SCND) in today’s economy and recent advances and technologies related to current trends like blockchain, Internet of things, and circular economy, the guest editors were selective to make sure that the accepted manuscripts consider these important aspects and satisfy the established journal policies.

In this regard, the accepted papers concentrate of different types of supply chains. For example, Pahlevan et al. (2021) considered the aluminum industry, while the agricultural industry was evaluated in Nasr et al. (2021) and Fallahpour et al. (2021). The nexus and industrial applications were studied by Molajou et al. (2021) and Li et al. (2021), respectively.

To evaluate resiliency in this area, the disasters like earthquakes and COVID-19 pandemic in supply chain management were studied by Beiki et al. (2021) and Shahed et al. (2021), respectively. It goes without saying that the environmental sustainability has been receiving a lot of attention from the community and was highly studied in this special issue. For example, the carbon management in supply chains was studied by Soleimani et al. (2021), Tavana et al. (2021), and Mao et al. (2021). The energy consumption and other environmental pollution factors were studied in Parast et al. (2021); Yuan and Wu (2021), Karimi et al. (2021), and Liang et al. (2021).

In addition, the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms is significant in the supply chain management. The machine learning algorithms and blockchain technologies in this research area were studied by Amini et al. (2021) and Moosavi et al. (2021), respectively. Finally, optimization was the heart of this special issue, and many studies were devoted to new practical optimization models for the area of sustainable supply chain management (Li et al. 2021b; Shabbir et al.2021; Zhao et al. 2021; Shang et al. 2021).

In conclusion, we tried our best to cover some of the major aspects of the topic and deliver outstanding papers in this area to adequately contribute to the existing literature and fill out some of the critical gaps in the state-of-the-art. At the end, we would like to express our gratitude to the editorial board of the journal, especially Prof. Philippe Garrigues, for giving us this great opportunity, to the reviewers, to the authors, and to all the editorial team members who helped us in this long journey.