Theory Building of Quattro Bottom Line Approach for Sustainable Reverse Logistics from Government Perspective: The Indonesia Evidence

Abstract

Reverse logistics activities are widely used application to preserve the environment in many developed countries from e-waste problem. Due to lack of public awareness in many emerging countries, implementation of reverse logistics program must be initiated by government. Besides that, reverse logistics practices often fail to balance among profit target achievement, the environmental conservation, and social harmony. Moreover, in the recent years, triple bottom line is not enough since many parties are only focused on their reputation due to they are afraid to be blame as the source of problems. Therefore, this research aims to build sustainable reverse logistics theory for emerging countries through quattro bottom line approach from government perspectives. Theory building process consists of systematic literature review, triangulation of data collection, major part of theory description, conceptualization and operationalization of theory. The result indicates a number of obligation that must be regulated by government for all parties that was divided into four categories, i.e. infrastructures and facilities provision, human resource commitment, regulation establishment, and managerial orientation. This theory can be adopted to measure performance of SRL Implementation.

Government and Intermediary Business Engagement for Controlling Electronic Waste in Indonesia: A Sustainable Reverse Logistics Theory through Customer Value Chain Analysis

“…This number is almost twice the size of the total population of Indonesia. The rapid growth of mobile phone sales is caused by consumers' consumptive behavior [4][5][6], economic growth, rapid technological development and innovations, and rapid changes in information and communication technology. However, prices remain affordable [1,7].…”

“…The four major challenges causing e-waste problems are worsening, namely, poor education and environmental awareness, lack of appropriate recycling technology, lack of incentives for collecting and recycling initiatives [1], and poor funding and environmental regulatory authorities [7][8][9]. Although cell phones are abundant, they are very difficult to locate and collect, seeming to disappear from circulation [5]. In addition to the lack of communities' awareness, the disappearance of e-waste from circulation is caused by the significant income-generating activities of informal business groups, such as scavengers, junkmen, stalls/kiosks, dealers, and local smelters [9].…”

“…They often ignore the harmful environmental consequences of their actions that results from their lack of high-technology equipment and skillful human resources to process the e-waste into a valuable product [10]. They operate their businesses manually [5,9,10], and are forced to operate for survival since they have no other source of financial power.…”

“…Most people in this area conducted manual accumulator reconditioning, one of the RL activities, as their main job. They knew that this activity was dangerous for them and the environment, but undertook it nonetheless since they did not have other alternatives to earn a living [5,6,9,10]. We witnessed that there were many people conducting RL activities who disregarded the pollution they produced [1,6,7,9,10], despite one of the goals of conducting RL activities being environmental preservation.…”

“…We are convinced that RL terminology is insufficient to be used and implemented in developing countries. We must give emphasis to sustainable concepts in RL activities and propose sustainable reverse logistics (SRL) terminology [5] for research in the area of environmental conservation, to anticipate the uninformed behavior [4,5], to ensure that all activities in the reverse value chain refer to sustainability goals, and to balance all expectations.…”