A Green Purchasing Model by Using ANP and LP Methods

Economic growth and development bring not only prosperity but also environmental degradation to the earth. In recent years, people have changed their views on traditional supply chain management (SCM). Green purchasing is a current trend in today's business process management. Green purchasing is a purchasing behavior for buying goods that emphasizes environmental protection. Due to governments' environmental regulations, such as WEEE and RoHS, directives have been formed and personal consciousness concerning the environment has been raised; therefore, green purchasing is strongly emphasized in SCM. In some high-tech industries, environmental consciousness may dominate the whole purchasing process, since vendors are asked to use environmentally-friendly materials. Customers thereby influence the component providers toward supplying environmentally-friendly products. For instance, in the PC board industry, the customers influence the suppliers' product manufacturing process with the aim of reducing the negative environmental impact of the materials used by vendors. This study models a green purchasing system by applying the analytic network process (ANP) and linear programming (LP) methods. The ANP provides the solution for green supplier selection and LP resolves the problem of order allocation for each vendor.