THE IMPACT OF LEAN & GREEN SUPPLY CHAIN PRACTICES ON SUSTAINABILITY: LITERATURE REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Background: The adoption of lean and green practices, sequentially or simultaneously, in the context of supply chain management has been recommended by researchers and practitioners as strategies to gain a sustainable competitive advantage while reducing negative social and environmental impacts. Hence, there is a growing interest in this topic. This attention is evident through the increased number of publications on lean and green supply chain practices. However, only a few studies have listed and classified these practices according to the different levels of the supply chain. Moreover, there is a restricted number of research papers that have highlighted the specific practices that impact each measurement of sustainable performance. Thus, this research aims to contribute to the literature in the field of supply chain management by presenting, in a simple and structured way, the different lean and green practices that have been studied by previous researchers, focusing on their impact on sustainable performance measurements. Methods: A rigorous literature review in seven steps was followed, based on the study and analysis of 23 research articles dealing with lean and green practices and their impact on the supply chain's sustainable performance. Results: The novelty of this research is that it presents, at the same time (i) a review of lean and green practices used in the context of supply chain management, and classified based on their citation frequency and level of use (upstream, internal and downstream), (ii) a focus on the practices that have been empirically studied as having an impact on supply chain's sustainable performance, as well as highlighting the indicators that are directly influenced by these practices, and (iii) a development of a conceptual framework, to present in a simplified way the lean and green practices that have an impact on one or more sustainable performance dimensions. The results of the study indicated that regarding the different levels of the supply chain, there is a dominance of practices used internally, with a greater number of lean practices compared to green practices. In addition, the majority of the practices identified have a positive impact on sustainable performance, except for some practices, namely "Cooperation with suppliers", "JIT philosophy", "Total Productive Maintenance", "Small lot-sizing" and "Reverse logistics", that have shown a disagreement between previous studies. It was concluded that the supply chain's environmental performance aspects are the most studied, followed by economic performance, then social performance Conclusions: Numerous recommendations are provided to help managers and decision-makers in their choices of lean and green strategies according to their sustainability objectives, and to guide academics in their future studies on this field.