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Electronic commerce is expected to influence a wide range of supply chain systems and thus lead to unidentified environmental impacts. Current studies discussing the impacts have the problem common in that they arrive either at conflicting or un-generalisable results. This article addresses the issue of methodology and proposes an assessment model for the resolution of this problem. Some important implications of this novel model for supply chain management are presented. This article shows that the subject of "Greening supply chains" is in need of a new focus and direction in research which involves building a new set of constructs for decision-making. Several benefits of this are addressed. Research in this subject is somewhat stagnating nowadays; it lacks specific research themes that are necessary for the integration of the available knowledge. Our model, proposed in this paper, represents a meeting point of the need of renewal of this subject, and the need to evaluate large-scale issues such as electronic commerce.

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relevancy/feasibility of the postponement strategy in food supply chains. The paper also aims at discussing the windows of opportunities for the growth of use of postponement by identifying the factors/drivers/enablers in the adoption of this strategy. It is out of the scope of this paper to survey a specific market/country, or answer how much or how many; it only captures as many cases as possible and build a categorised picture of postponement against the various food commodities by using semi-structured interviews. Our research results show that food postponement is a relevant strategy across the different types of food commodities/categories (frozen, chilled/fresh and long shelf life). Moreover, the results also show that this is not limited to one form of postponement as one may expect (such as logistics postponement or repacking display packs for instance), but is in fact related to the various forms of postponement.

There are accelerating trends for the implementation of electronic commerce (e-commerce) as an extra marketing channel for selling products globally via the access of the Internet. This is expected to influence the shape of future cities and the conservation of natural resources. This paper critically reviews the current research work to date regarding the environmental implications of e-commerce. The main observation is that there are difficulties to generalise the results. There is a general agreement that it is highly difficult, if not impossible, to state if the damaging effects of e-commerce on the environment can weigh over the advantageous effects or the contrary. One proposition in this context is that instead of looking at e-commerce as "a vehicle driving towards freely satisfying the market needs", we should look at e-commerce as "a cart attached to our vehicle towards sustainable development".