| Summary: | This study provides an empirical assessment of the antecedents and outcomes of Environmental Supply Chain Management within the UK food industry. Sustainability has emerged as an important issue within the Operations and Supply Chain Management fields in recent years. The objective of this study is to contribute to the new and emerging field of Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) by considering some of its key recurring themes. An extensive literature review in chapter two highlights three key issues requiring further attention namely, environmental response (proactive or reactive), the role of stakeholder pressure and the performance outcomes of SSCM. On the back of this literature review, chapter three identifies a series of research questions in need of investigation and sets out a theoretical model for the task. Data was gathered from a sample of 1200 food manufacturing firms within the UK, generating a response rate of 12.4%. This data was then analysed using ,multiple regression analysis. The key findings were: (1) a proactive approach to environmental management is associated with a number of different environmental practices both internally and at the supply chain level; (2) firms mostly appear to be motivated to implement these practices as a result of their internalised commitment to the environment rather than due to external pressure from different stakeholder groups. Lastly, there was some evidence to suggest that environmental performance might benefit as a result of environmental management, however, improvements do not appear to penetrate to the level of operational performance. These findings contribute to existing research and thus help to further the development of the SSCM field.
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