The reverse supply chain is one of the emerging areas in the field of supply chain management. The reverse supply chain consists of a list of activities involved in recovering used products for the purpose of recycling, remanufacturing and proper disposal by a manufacturer. Companies in Europe, USA and other developed nations are already practicing reverse supply chain. The main forces behind this development are environmental legislation related to disposal, opportunity to retrieve some value from old products like components, opportunity to remanufacture old products and to serve secondary markets and opportunity to become an environment-friendly organization. The Indian companies can also gain competitive advantage, if they practice reverse supply chain in their industry. There are many issues related to management of this reverse supply chain and it also poses lots of challenges. The major issues and challenges are designs of the reverse logistics network, inventory management, forecasting returns, outsourcing, role of information technology and role of customers (who return the product). This paper gives a comprehensive coverage of these issues and challenges with respect to reverse supply chain.

The reverse supply chain is one of the emerging areas of interest in the field of supply chain management. The reverse supply chain consists of a list of activities involved in recovering used products for the purpose of recycling, remanufacturing and proper disposal by a manufacturer. The chain connects the end-users with the manufacturers in a reverse direction. Reuse and remanufacturing of products and materials are not new in the industry. The examples of wastepaper recycling, metal scrap brokers and soft drink industry are around for a long time. In these cases recovery of the used products is economically more attractive than disposal. But in recent past there has been a growing interest among industries in reusing and remanufacturing and that leads to more studies in the area of reverse logistics. `Reverse supply chain' and `reverse logistics' are two phrases that have been used synonymously in this article. The major forces behind this development are: