This study conducts a comprehensive literature review of articles on the triple bottom line (TBL) published from January 1997 to September 2018 to provide significant insights and support to guide further discussion. There were three booms in TBL publications, occurring in 2003, 2011, and 2015, and many articles attempt to address the issue of sustainability by employing the TBL. This literature analysis includes 720, 132, and 58 articles from the Web of Science (WOS), Inspec, and Scopus databases, respectively, and reveals the gaps in existing research. To discover the barriers and points of overlap, these articles are categorized into six aspects of the TBL: economic, environmental, social, operations, technology, and engineering. Examining the top 3 journals in terms of published articles on each aspect reveals the research trends and gaps. The findings provide solid evidence confirming the argument that the TBL as currently defined is insufficient to cover the entire concept of sustainability. The social and engineering aspects still require more discussion to support the linkage of the TBL and to reinforce its theoretical basis. Additionally, to discover the gaps in the data sources, theories applied, methods adopted, and types of contributions, this article summarizes 82 highly cited articles covering each aspect. This article offers theoretical insights by identifying the top contributing countries, institutions, authors, keyword networks, and authorship networks to encourage scholars to push the current discussion further forward, and it provides practical insights to bridge the gap between theory and practice for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of improvements.

Prior studies are lacking on the drivers of sustainable investment. Hence, this study examines the relationship between the social aspects, environmental aspects, economic benefits, market conditions, and corporate governance issues on sustainable investment. Sustainable investment has been rising since the last decade. However, sustainable investment is preceded by ethical investment, green investment, and socially responsible investment. In order to understand the sustainability of an investment before decision-making, it proposed a set of attributes to measure its sustainability using investor’s linguistics preferences. The proposed attributes are interrelated and based on investor’s linguistic preferences. The study employs the fuzzy set theory to handle the uncertainty resulting from the vagueness of linguistic terms and applies decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) to determine the nature of interrelationships among sustainable investment attributes. The result indicates that corporate governance, economic performance, and market risks are the causal aspects of sustainable investment. In addition, this study found that transparency, anti-corruption, and board diversity were the two most important criteria of corporate governance. Furthermore, the three most important criteria of economic performance presented the model were excess return, market value, and shareholder loyalty. The theoretical and practical implications of sustainable investment are discussed.

This study aims to identify the causal attributes of sustainable agritourism in Thailand. Agritourism is a systematic approach based on farm diversification for tourism purposes. Agritourism is usually assessed with qualitative information. However, the assessment of agritourism attributes involves considering the interrelationships among the attributes. Prior studies on sustainable agritourism do not identify and address interrelated attributes using qualitative information. This study applies the Delphi method to identify a set of valid attributes. Moreover, this study applies triangular fuzzy numbers to transform the qualitative information into comparable values and uses a decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory to identify the interrelationships among the attributes in the causal model. The results show that sustainable business performance and rural economic conditions are the key drivers of environmental sustainability. This result suggests that the attributes that may potentially stimulate sustainable agritourism are the development and implementation of an agritourism-specific plan, the development of a local business value chain, and government-led tourism promotion.

Sustainable consumption has been addressed in the literature in recent years, especially in relation to changing from a traditional consumption to sustainable consumption. Reducing environmental impacts from waste generation has been the focal point of sustainable consumption. However, a large number of attributes has caused a complexity in understanding which attributes effectively enhance the consumption. In particular, sustainable consumption has been facing a negative trend due to low levels of knowledge about packaging’s environmental impact, failed communication which leads to misperception and irresponsible behavior. This study contributes to proposing a set of attributes for enhancing sustainable consumption in the Indonesian food industry, to fulfill the lack of understanding of the attribute interrelationships using qualitative information. This study proposes a set of attributes to enhance sustainable consumption with qualitative information by assessing the interrelationships among the attributes employing the Delphi method and fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method to provide causal and effect relationships. As a result, corporate communication, consumer perception, consumer behavior, and product packaging are major aspects for sustainable consumption enhancement. Corporate communication becomes a major driver to affect perception and behavior. This study proposes a managerial insight for the packaged food industry on improving several criteria including green marketing, green consumerism, verbal features, and importance of information.

This study proposes a multi-objective production programming model which is established for systematic sorting and remanufacturing second-hand clothes and the objectives are twofold: (1) minimizing the remanufacturing cost to maintain the competitiveness of second-hand clothing industry and (2) maximizing the recycle rate to reduce the environmental impact from the disposed clothes. Previous studies are lacking to involve the features of second-hand clothing recycled from reuse to recycle in optimizing both the remanufacturing costs and recycle rate. The consequential final destination of consumers’ second-hand clothes is either resold, donated, or disposed of. This study applied sensitivity analysis by varying production cost and new material cost are conducted to evaluate the suitability of three different types of sorting methods for second-hand clothes before let them entering the remanufacturing processes on (1) categories the used clothes; (2) worn-out conditions (high, medium, low), and (3) clothes materials (cotton, linen, wool, silk, artificial fiber). The results show that the first sorting method by clothing categories outperforms the other two methods in maximizing the recycling rate. The second sorting method by worn-out condition generates a minimal remanufacturing cost. The recycling scenarios are simulated to verify the applicability of the proposed programming model with respect to the three sorting methods. The results show that Taiwan exhibited superior the recycle rates and Bangladesh had lower remanufacturing costs by adopting the sorting method by clothes materials.

This study aims to validate the sustainable total resource management measures and provide a hierarchical structure to manage the medical resources for the healthcare industry in Thailand. Prior studies have failed to deal with the valid attributes and to present a theoretical hierarchical structure. The Thailand healthcare industry faces medical resource depletion in the current pandemic outbreak. To address these gaps, this study proposes a fuzzy Delphi method to screen out the less important attributes in order to enhance the validity of measures. Fuzzy interpretive structural modelling transfers the complex interrelationships into a hierarchical structure and provides the direction for practical improvement. The result shows that green human resources practices, collaboration in supply chain networks, analysis and knowledge management, and technology innovation are all important aspects of the hierarchical structure for practical improvement. The linkage criteria are (1) green ability, (2) green motivation, (3) operational efficiency, (4) environmental regulation, and (5) energy conservation. The theoretical and managerial implications are subsequently discussed.