Collaboration and Evaluation in the Supply Chain: The Impact on Plant‐level Environmental Investment

Manufacturing organizations can potentially improve environmental management both by increasing the level of investment in environmental technologies and by shifting that investment away from pollution control and toward pollution prevention. However, managers must not only consider their own manufacturing operations in isolation, but also those of others along the supply chain. This paper explores two dimensions of supply chain activities—collaboration and evaluation—that might be leveraged by plant managers to improve environmental management in their own plant. The linkages with suppliers and customers were assessed. Both customer‐ and plant‐initiated collaboration were found to have a significant effect on the level and form of investment in environmental technologies for a sample of Canadian plants. Of greatest importance, as customer‐initiated collaborative activities increased, plant‐level investment in environmental management was increasingly allocated toward pollution prevention. In contrast, only very limited evidence was found that evaluative activities influenced environmental investment.