Promising Areas for Future Research on Reverse Logistics: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

During the early nineties, the Council of Logistics Management started publishing studies where Reverse Logistics was recognized as being relevant both for business and society (Stock, 1992). Other studies followed stressing the opportunities on reuse and recycling (Kopicki et al., 1993), discussing marketing aspects (Kostecki, 1998) and reported on the U.S. experience (Rogers and Tibben-Lembke, 1999). In Europe, an inter-university EU sponsored project called RevLog had served as one of the motors for European Research on Reverse Logistics. For the last 5 years, researchers associated with RevLog have co-authored more than 100 papers on the subject (see Dekker et al., 2003). Very recently, the RevLog group organized a meeting to identify ?Promising Areas for Future Research on Reverse Logistics.? In this paper we report the outcome of such meeting.

Keywords: reverse logistics, future, exploratory study, nominal group technique

JEL Classification: M, M11, R4