Sustainable supply chain management for minerals

As inputs to virtually all supply chains (SCs), mineral resources drive the modern economy. However, despite the substantial sustainability impact of the initial stages of mineral SCs, these remain largely outside the scope of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM). This paper aims to map the intersection of the literature on sustainability in mineral SCs and SSCM, thus bridging the current gap, and to propose research directions for future work. The paper presents a structured content-analysis based literature review of 67 peer-reviewed, English-language journal papers listed in the Web of Science database. These have been identified via a keyword search for SC-, mineral- and mining-specific terms. The content analysis is based on the work of Beske and Seuring (2014), which is abductively complemented with mineral SC-specific practices to build a comprehensive SSCM for minerals framework. Furthermore a contingency analysis is conducted to reveal association patterns between the used constructs. As main contribution, we propose the addition of a Government interventions category as well as mineral-specific practices to the Risk and Pro-activity management categories of the framework. These are identified as essential practices for improving the sustainability in mineral SCs. Moreover, a cascaded mineral SC design is proposed adopting literature based propositions. It complements the traditional downstream buyer-supplier concept in SSCM by adding a second buyer-supplier relationship led by an upstream focal firm for enhanced sustainability management. This design integrates mineral extraction and refinement into a comprehensive SSCM approach and proposes practices for its realization. The resulting approach thus offers the potential for supreme sustainability performance in mineral SCs. Finally, research directions for future studies on this issue are formulated.