VOLUME TITLE

EC2024 Volume 22

Gökçe Esenduran, Volume Co-editor

Gilvan Souza, Volume Co-editor

Ruben Lobel, Volume Co-editor

Nicholas G. Hall, Editor

Published September 12, 2024

A sustainable operation is one that can be carried out forever. To that end, a sustainable operation in a for-profit organization maximizes the triple bottom line of economic, environmental and social outcomes. In other words, it takes into account the 3P’s:

• Profit: The operation has to be profitable, by definition.
• People: The operation has to satisfy its stakeholders: shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, governments, and communities where it operates.
• Planet: Inputs can be sourced forever, the transformation process is non-polluting, and the outputs can be repaired, reused, recycled, composted, and/or remanufactured.

The INFORMS community in operations management, in particular the Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (M&SOM) Society, has a rich history of research in sustainability. For the purposes of this collection, we categorize the research into five separate themes: (i) energy and emissions reduction, (ii) responsible sourcing, (iii) closed-loop supply chains and the circular economy, (iv) social sustainability & poverty alleviation, and (v) transportation and servicizing.

The order of research papers for each of the sections is in chronological order, starting from oldest to newest. At the end of each section, we also provide some relevant teaching cases and videos