‘Green’ value chain practices in the furniture industry

Abstract This paper draws on the results of interviews with five environmental managers in the furniture industry to develop a taxonomy of environmentally‐friendly (‘green’) best practices within the operations management value chain. This taxonomy is then extended to develop a group of propositions concerning the role of management in promoting environmentally‐friendly practices. The results suggest that in order to be successful, environmental management strategies must be integrated into all stages of the value chain, which includes all of the processes spanning product design, procurement, manufacturing and assembly, packaging, logistics, and distribution. While the potential for environmental performance improvement in all five of the companies is evident, all of them demonstrated ‘pockets’ of environmentally‐friendly practices (EFP) in different areas of their respective value chain functions. The propositions and results emerging from the analysis also suggests that reacting to regulations is no longer sufficient. World‐class EFP must anticipate and pre‐empt changing environmental regulations and customer expectations, and proactively prepare products, processes and infrastructure for these changes without sacrificing competitive advantage.