This paper focuses on measures towards sustainable development of coal ports based on the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of the triple bottom line, and examines the integration and optimization roles of smart technologies on coal port sustainability in the era of the Internet of Things. By investigating the representative case of Huanghua Port, one of the largest coal transportation ports in China, this paper enables a better understanding of the coal port’s sustainable practices driven by smart technologies. This study provides measures on the intelligent renovation, coal dust pollution treatment, air pollution treatment and sewage treatment, the customer and employee satisfaction improvement, and community involvement as well as social reputation enhancement. The research investigates the effectiveness of measures on the coal port’s sustainability by examining changes in key performance indicators and further examines the integration and optimization roles of smart technologies. The findings show that the approach taken by the port can effectively promote the coal port’s sustainability. The intelligent operation control system linking the separate nodes in operation, the ecological intelligent control system integrating environmental protection functions, and the intelligent service platform linking supply chain members are interrelated and interact to achieve the continuous optimization of decisions towards coal port sustainability. This study offers managerial insights for the port operators and policymakers towards the sustainable and smart development of ports.

Many small manufacturing factories suffer insufficient environment-friendly capacity after eliminating the outdated and environmental-harmful production capacity according to stringent environmental rules and regulations. This paper analyzes two strategies that the manufacturer with limited environment-friendly capacity may take to tackle this problem, i.e., investing in building environment-friendly capacities and collaborating with the manufacturer with sufficient environment-friendly capacity in capacity sharing. In a supply chain with two competing manufacturers, this paper builds game-theoretical models and investigates equilibrium solutions under three scenarios (no capacity investment or sharing, capacity investment, and capacity sharing). Then this research investigates the feasible regions of these two strategies and compares the performance of each manufacturer under each scenario. The findings show that both capacity investment and capacity sharing can effectively reduce the profit loss of the manufacturer with limited capacity, while only capacity sharing benefits both manufacturers. The feasibility of these two strategies depends on the initial capacity volume and the capacity investment cost coefficient of the manufacturer with limited capacity. Moreover, the preference of the manufacturer with limited capacity for each strategy depends on the capacity investment cost coefficient. When the capacity investment cost coefficient is relatively high, the win-win situation exists for supply chain members. Furthermore, with the use of chaos theory, the paper shows how to adjust the capacity investment in each period to keep the system stable.

In the context of sharing economy, a manufacturer can source from two alternative channels: sharing and traditional, when facing production capacity constraints and sustainably conscious consumers. The aim of the paper is to analyze channel selection and pricing strategies of the manufacturer for achieving sustainable operations, to investigate the operations of the platform regarding charging modes, access requirements, and commission rates in different stages of development, and to discuss the interaction among all stakeholders for sustainability in the whole system. The game-theoretic approach is adopted. The results provide references for decisions of the manufacturer and surplus production capacity supplier to join in the sharing, as well as corresponding optimal pricing strategies, which guides platforms to keep a balance between profitability and attracting participants by relatively low access requirements and commission rates. Moreover, developing platforms prefer to charge suppliers and set low access requirements while relatively developed platforms tend to charge bilateral sides or manufacturers and set high access requirements. Charging the manufacturer encourages the bilateral participation of the platform most. In addition, as charging mode changes, the trend of changes in consumer surplus and social welfare is the same as that in the market share of products from the sharing channel.