Using the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct to Evaluate Green Supply Chain Management: An Empirical Study of Taiwan’s Computer Industry

Electronics companies throughout Asia recognize the benefits of Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) for gaining competitive advantage. A large majority of electronics companies in Taiwan have recently adopted the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) Code of Conduct for defining and managing their social and environmental responsibilities throughout their supply chains. We surveyed 106 Tier 1 suppliers to the Taiwanese computer industry to determine their environmental performance using the EICC Code of Conduct (EICC Code) and performed Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) on the 63/106 questionnaire responses collected. We test the results to determine whether differences in product type, geographic area, and supplier size correlate with different levels of environmental performance. To our knowledge, this is the first study to analyze questionnaire data on supplier adoption to optimize the implementation of GSCM. The results suggest that characteristic classification of suppliers could be employed to enhance the efficiency of GSCM.