This is a proposal to hold the 5th Closed-Loop Supply Chain workshop from October 9-11, 2005 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Closed-loop supply chains (CLSC) consider all of the activities in the life cycle of a product from design through end-of-life recovery. The workshop will bring together 70-75 of the world's leading researchers on CLSCs to present and discuss current research and to construct a broader, more diverse research agenda that will address how to make supply chains economically and ecologically sustainable. The workshop will be organized into sessions devoted to the following research themes: (1) Sustainable Product Design and Development for CLSC; (2) Information Technology for CLSCs: Intelligent Sensoring and Monitoring (3) Global CLSC Networks; (4) Sustainable Systems. The workshop will have considerable intellectual merit because it serves as the principal scientific forum for research on closed-loop supply chains. By bringing together an international group of researchers from engineering and the sciences, operations research, management, industrial ecology, environmental sciences and logistics, the workshop promotes a multi-disciplinary perspective on CLSC issues that yields important new lines of research and new cases for courses in CLSC. The four previous annual workshops have been extraordinarily successful in stimulating research and creating an active, productive community of scholars addressing issues of great importance to both business and society. Most of the important recent publications in this area are based on ideas and issues discussed in these annual workshops. The principal output of the workshop will be the generation of new ideas about how to manage CLSCs: the research agenda we will develop and the future research publications that follow from that agenda. The research on CLSC that this workshop stimulates will bring substantial benefit to society by discovering better ways to design and manage systems to support the reuse (via repair, remanufacturing and recycling) of products, components and materials. These benefits include: reduction in landfill due to direct reuse of products and materials, reduction in raw materials consumption (and the corresponding energy), and the development of sustainable production systems.
