Not-for-profit supply chains for product take-back: practices, unique logistical challenges and directions for new research

Abstract

The extant literature in the field of reverse logistics has paid scant attention to take-back supply chains that are not aimed at making a profit. We attempt to flesh out this knowledge by highlighting how the processes of core acquisition, remanufacturing and marketing segmentation carried out in not-for-profit supply chains differ from those of for-profit ones. Drawing on the observed dissimilarities, we establish that the former have logistical and marketing challenges that are unique to them, which have not been examined in prior research, e.g. donations being the main source of core, there is a need to maximise the volume and quality of products that are returned as donations. We conclude this paper by proposing questions for future research, e.g. How to improve the collection of core when no direct financial incentives are offered? What are the company (donor) specific determinants, e.g. size and industry, moderating the quality of donations?

Keywords:

• e-waste
• voluntary sector
• remanufacturing
• not-for-profit organisations
• sustainable supply chains and reverse logistics

Acknowledgements

We are in debt to the organisations that agreed to participate in our interviews.

Notes

1. For a review on the critical role that of collaboration between these players, we refer the reader to Jayaraman, Ross, and Agarwal (2008).

2. The collector influences all three phases that constitute a supply chain for product recovery: product acquisition, testing/remanufacturing and marketing.

3. We have used Google^TM for the searches.

4. To triangulate, and to increase the validity of our results to other parts of the world, we repeated the same research in German (query: ‘computer spenden’). We initially believed that the results for German-speaking countries would differ from those of English speaking countries (we believed that donating PCs was, for instance, more ubiquitous in the UK than in Germany), an intuition that has not been fully supported by our analyses. The results on the German market were not included in the discussions of this paper.

5. It is worth saying that this is necessarily not a view shared by the authors. We are just reporting the fact that some organisations do not see remanufacturing as an environmentally friendly initiative.

6. It is worth mentioning that Curran and Williams (2010) focuses on furniture, electrical and IT appliances, as opposed to computers only.