Reviewing Distribution Issues in Reverse Logistics

Abstract

Growing environmental concern has called much attention to industrial recovery of used products and materials. Driven by customer expectations and legislative regulation, manufacturers are held responsible to an increasing extent for the entire lifecycle of their products. From a logistics perspective, take-back and recovery of used products leads to additional goods flows from the users back to the sphere of producers, "Reverse Logistics" addresses the management of these flows opposite to the conventional supply chain flows. In this paper we consider Reverse Logistics from a distribution management perspective. We review major issues and concepts and discuss upcoming decision problems, paying special attention to logistics network design. Moreover, we point out both specific characteristics of Reverse Logistics and parallels with traditional logistics contexts. We illustrate our analysis with a number of examples based on recent case studies.