Owing to the rising greenhouse emission and the environmental pollution, a company's ecological footprint is seriously influencing the world's ecosystems, and the poor global environmental problems are changing a corporate strategy of a company (Saul et all. 2013, 42). "Green supply Chain Management (GSCM) is an approach to improve performance of the process and products according to the requirements of the environmental regulations" (Hsu and Hu 2008). Logistics activities and environmental developments are two major elements in GSCM. In short, logistics is defined as the management of the flow of materials, goods, services, money and information (Zheng 2012). The purpose of this essay is to evaluate a multinational corporation-Swedish home furnishing IKEA, which considers green supply chain management (GSCM) as an important strategic management to reduce environmental impacts in all the elements of the supply chain (Hsu and Hu 2008). The strategy is to minimize environmental impacts by means of applying advanced technologies or changing transportation models. Therefore, this essay will examine IKEA's GSCM into two main sections. First and foremost, it will give an explanation of why and how IKEA aims to improve the energy efficiency and set goals to improve their product's waste management, due to the complex material flow through its production logistics within factories, sales, transportation, distribution, and the reverse logistics of wasted final products. Secondly, it will examine the approaches, which used by IKEA. These critical approaches are aiming to decrease the carbon footprint, such as efficient packing and packaging design by recycling materials and reproducing new sources of raw materials products. Meanwhile, IKEA is encouraging their suppliers to reduce more unnecessary carbon dioxide and greenhouse emissions during the transport process. As a result, all information can illustrate how a Swedish retail-furnishing giant succeeds in the influential factors of eco-efficiency and carbon footprints in their supply chain system.
