Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a special issue about the construction industry and the management of its supply chains. It aims to discuss and point to some differences and possible similarities with traditional manufacturing and its supply chains. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is mostly a literature review and contains official statistics. Findings – The market of the construction company is mostly local and highly volatile. The long durability of the construction “product” contributes to the volatility. The product specification process before the customer order arrives shows different degrees of specifications: engineer to order, modify to order, configure to order, select a variant. (The common make-to-stock in traditional manufacturing does not exist.) A construction company only executes a small part of the project by its own personnel and capacity. This is a way of risk spreading and risk mitigation and to compensate for an unstable market. If a construction company wants to establish a new concept, from “engineer to order” to e.g. “configure to order”, it must be engaged earlier in the business process and with other than usual customers, which might complicate the process. Research limitations/implications – Experiences from Sweden and Swedish developments are the main source of information. Originality/value – The paper introduces the articles that are a source of scientifically generated knowledge regarding various problems and opportunities associated with supply chain management in the project-based construction industry.

Policy-makers are developing regulation policies to drive down carbon emissions from industries. Independent remanufacturers (IRs), which remanufacture recycled products/components/parts, must manage and evaluate economic costs generated by the production under future carbon emission regulations. We present three optimisation models to determine the remanufacturing quantity that maximises the total profits under three common carbon emission regulation policies: (a) mandatory carbon emissions capacity, (b) carbon tax and (c) cap and trade. These models include sales revenue, remanufacturing cost, disposal cost, inventory holding cost, shortage cost and carbon emission cost. The max–min approach is used to solve the models, which assume limited information on demand distribution. We investigate how the three regulation policies affect remanufacturing decision-making for IRs and we also solve some numerical examples where we vary the magnitudes of incentives, penalties and stringency of constraints to provide implications to policy-makers. The results indicate that remanufacturers should aim to improve yield rate to maximise the profit irrespective of the implemented carbon emissions policy. Policy-makers should prefer the carbon tax policy, if any of the other two policies must be performed, a remanufacturing discount such as a higher carbon emission cap or lower penalty should be implemented to better promote the development of remanufacturers.