Integrating corporate website information into qualitative assessment for benchmarking green supply chain management practices for the chemical industry.

The China's chemical industry has been endeavouring to promote sustainable development through practicing green supply chain management (GSCM). This paper proposes a multi-criteria decision framework with twenty practices to guide companies in the industry to enact GSCM effectively. The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) has been used to cluster the proposed practices. We found five aspects, including economic initiatives, environmental management, eco-design, resource recycling, and stakeholder and employee, constitute the underlying structure of GSCM. A mixed decision tool combining the entropy weight method (EWM) and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been developed and applied to identify key factors. Official website information has been collected and used to analyse the website contents of five benchmarking companies in the China's chemical industry. The results reveal that the aspects of environmental management, eco-design and resource recycling are the most important GSCM themes. Moreover, the top five practices are top management support, performing life cycle assessment, managing environmental risks, advancing recycling technologies and integrating reverse logistics. Conceptual and practical implications are discussed. • A novel five-dimension GSCM framework is proposed using EFA. • A mixed decision method combining EWM and AHP is developed and applied. • Corporate websites and experts' assessments are used to benchmark GSCM practices. • Decisive GSCM aspects and practices for China's chemical industry are identified. • Integrating corporate website information notably modifies analytical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]