A truly sustainable organization requires ongoing changes in how its supply chain is designed and managed through explicit considerations of economic, environmental, and social performance measures in strategic, tactical, and operational decision making (Brandenburg et al. 2014; Fahimnia et al. 2015a). The development of a sustainable supply chain has remained an ‘aspiration’ primarily due to the complexities associated with the development of supply chain optimization models that are able to capture and quantify the key social and environmental performance measures, in addition to the traditional economic-oriented measures (Fahimnia et al. 2015c; Rezaee et al. 2017). Recent reviews have shown that theoretical and conceptual studies of sustainable supply chain management have dominated the field, with little attention being given to the development of analytical models and decision tools that incorporate multiple sustainability measures into supply chain design and management decisions (Fahimnia et al. 2015b; Seuring 2013).

This special issue of the Annals of Operations Research includes ten papers that make original contributions to the development of analytical models and decision tools for design and management of sustainable supply chains. While each paper offers clear modeling and methodological contributions, a common aspect of all papers is the use of real data in exploring the real world applications of these modeling efforts. We hope you enjoy reading these papers as much as the guest editors and reviewers of the papers did.