Sustainable Procurement: knowledge and practice towards sustainable development - e-Book

In recent decades, sustainability has become a goal to be achieved throughout the world; it is a direction into which efforts are to be put to solve the global challenges that people are facing today. The spectrum of Sustainable Goals is extensive and wide, ranging from poverty reduction, to human rights and equality of opportunity, and to environmental issues, such as biodiversity conservation, energy efficiency, climate mitigation and adaptation, and waste reduction (see, among others, UNEP, 2017 and UNOPS, 2017). The concept of sustainability has emerged since the 1970s. Today, it has become a crucial paradigm in supply chain management (SCM) (Seuring and Müller, 2008) and is also the foundation for one of the most significant international cooperation initiatives (i.e. the agenda for Sustainable Development Goals 2030), which explicitly highlights procurement as an effective way to support the achievement of sustainable objectives. Indeed, a variety of activities and processes have been substantially influenced and involved, and “procurement” is one of them.