Closing Editorial: Sustainable Supply Chain Management and Green Product Development—Insights, Innovations and Future Directions

Sustainability has become an important facet of modern supply chain management and product development, guiding corporate strategies, government policies and global economic development. This Special Issue of Sustainability, entitled “Sustainable Supply Chain Management and Green Product Development”, aims to integrate theoretical innovation with practical application, explore eco-friendly strategies and digital technology integration, and address the challenges and opportunities of sustainable development across industries. Following a rigorous peer review, we present eight high-quality research papers spanning micro-enterprise decision-making, meso-level supply chain collaboration, and macro-level institutional policy design, covering online catering, new energy vehicles, cross-border logistics and other sectors; these studies adopt methodologies such as game theory, spatial friction modeling and empirical evaluation methods. Subsequently, these works provide novel insights and actionable recommendations for advancing sustainable supply chain and green product development, reflecting the interdisciplinary and practical nature of this field.

This Special Issue centers on three core research themes. First, enterprise-level green decision-making driven by consumer awareness and policy incentives. Zhang and colleagues clarified the relationship between green utility, consumer baseline utility and optimal pricing for online catering enterprises, providing green pricing guidelines for the sector. Work from Ren’s team confirmed that government subsidies effectively boost green investment and supply chain service levels, and that centralized decision-making maximizes subsidy effects by alleviating double marginalization. Song and colleagues found that government subsidies outperform cost-sharing contracts in incentivizing quality investment in the electric scooter supply chain, offering solutions for the industry’s battery quality and safety issues. Together, these studies optimize the theoretical framework for enterprise green strategic decision-making.

The second research theme is the impact of low-carbon policies and market mechanisms on supply chain collaboration. Shao and colleagues revealed that carbon cap-and-trade policies shape the production and cooperation strategies of the new energy vehicle power battery supply chain, and that excessive carbon trading prices may hinder emission reduction and market demand, providing a basis for rational carbon policy design. Work from Xiao’s team conducted a macro-level empirical analysis of China’s ecological civilization construction institutionalization, identifying its regional disparities and key influencing factors (government anti-corruption, market openness, public participation and education quality), linking macro-level institutional construction with micro-level supply chain sustainable practices and highlighting the importance of a sound policy environment for green development.

The third research theme is sustainable logistics and infrastructure optimization as enablers of low-carbon supply chains. Work from Yu’s team verified that improved infrastructure reliability and trade facilitation significantly enhance the competitiveness of the China Railway Express, providing evidence for optimizing cross-border logistics and promoting sustainable international trade. Aydemir and colleagues proposed a shared-fleet logistics model for the public sector through a UK case study, which achieves significant reductions in emissions, costs and vehicle mileage while improving service quality, offering a replicable model for global sustainable urban and healthcare logistics. Lee and colleagues developed an integrated ANP-based decision framework augmented by neural feature extraction for ESG-driven green supply chain management, identifying eco-friendly design, energy efficiency, and carbon-climate management as core drivers, and validating the model’s high robustness through sensitivity analysis and Monte Carlo simulation.

Collectively, the papers in this Special Issue make three key contributions: expanding the theoretical and methodological toolkit for green supply chain research by applying diverse methods to real-world scenarios; achieving cross-scale and cross-sector research integration, from micro-enterprise decisions to macro-level institutional design; and balancing theoretical innovation with practical relevance, with each study providing targeted managerial and policy recommendations.

While this Special Issue advances the field, sustainable supply chain management and green product development are rapidly evolving, and several critical future research directions emerge. First, the integration of multi-agent competition and dynamic market dynamics into theoretical models to reflect the complexity of real-world supply chains. Second, the exploration of the deep integration of digital technologies (AI, big data, blockchain) with green supply chain design and manufacturing, unlocking their potential for environmental and efficiency gains. Third, the carrying out of more empirical research on the practical implementation of the circular economy and life cycle assessment (LCA) in different industries. Fourth, the study of cross-regional and global coordination of green policies to address heterogeneity and conflicts in global supply chains. Fifth, the drawing of attention towards the social dimensions of sustainability, achieving a balance of environmental, economic and social benefits (the triple bottom line).

We extend our sincere gratitude to all contributors to this Special Issue, and we thank the authors for their rigorous and innovative research, which forms its foundation. We are grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive and meticulous reviews that ensured the academic quality of the papers. We also thank the editorial team of Sustainability for their professional and efficient support throughout the process. Finally, we thank the readers and the broader research and practitioner community for their interest in this field.

Faced with global environmental challenges such as climate change and resource depletion, sustainable supply chain management and green product development will only grow in importance. This Special Issue captures the current state of research in the field, and we hope it will inspire further theoretical innovation, empirical research and practical application. We believe that the insights from these papers will guide enterprises, governments and stakeholders in pursuing sustainable development, and interdisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration will drive the creation of more innovative and inclusive sustainable practices. Together, we can build economically viable, environmentally friendly and socially responsible supply chains and products, laying the foundation for a more sustainable future.