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# A Review of Sustainable Composites Supply Chains

Md Rabiul Hasan and Thorsten Wuest

IMSE West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26501, United States

mh00071@mix.wvu.edu, thwuest@mail.wvu.edu

**Abstract.** The goal of this study is to explore and analyze the progress, methodologies, and maturity level of the composite materials Supply Chain (SC) from a sustainability lens. The SCOPUS database has been used to analyze the existing literature on composite materials SC, and VOS viewer software and MS Excel are used to analyze the data. First, a bibliometric analysis (Co-authorship of countries, Co-authorship analysis of authors, Co-occurrence analysis of keywords, and Bibliographic coupling of documents) has been carried out while following the PRISMA framework to explore and depict the overall growth of this research field. Second, an in-depth review of the selected papers (n = 20) addresses the concrete research questions for future research studies to build a bridge between the research gaps and the efforts to ensure a sustainable SC for composite materials. The outcomes of this research work reveal that the SC of composite materials is right now in its infant phase, which is not a saturated research field yet, and that much more research studies are required to add value to the existing knowledge of this field.

**Keywords:** Supply chain · Composite materials · Sustainability · Cascade use

## 1 Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown a light on the fragility of today's manufacturing SCs. However, the issues behind the limited resiliency of modern SCs across various industries are not new and need to be understood and addressed urgently. The composites manufacturing industry is no exception [1]. Globalized supply combined with increasing restrictions and trade barriers for key materials [2] leads to an urgent focus on better understanding of SC related issues and efforts to reduce dependencies on a limited number of suppliers. At the same time, sustainability is rapidly emerging as a key driver of innovation and competitive advantage. The global goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 [3] as well as increasing awareness of and demand for sustainable products of customers, both end customers, and businesses, is transforming industries. The composites manufacturing industry, while offering products that perform competitively and can contribute to lighter-weight vehicles, faces a particular challenge regarding end-of-life processes. Many composites are based on thermoset polymers posing challenges for recycling, remanufacturing, and other higher cascade use levels. More research is
needed to support the industry in their endeavor to reduce the impact of its products and improve the end-of-life processes. To be effective, both technological innovations, such as new remanufacturing techniques, and SC innovations are necessary to provide a sustainable impact in the composites industry. In this paper, we explore the current state of the art of sustainable SC related research in the composites industry via a literature review. The objective of the paper is to identify research gaps in this field and define concrete research questions that must be addressed moving forward to support the industry's quest of a more resilient and sustainable SC of end-of-life composites materials.

## 2 Research Methodology

PRISMA framework (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis) is used to extract the existing literature on the composite materials SC [4]. To ensure a high quality of the reviewed scholarly works, the SCOPUS database is used for relevant scientific journals and articles. In this research, composites or composite materials are understood as a material that contains two or more constituent materials, in most cases a matrix material and a reinforcement material [5]. Different composite materials terms are also considered for the search terminology. SCOPUS search is conducted to capture the major words that deal with the SC for composite materials in the title, abstract, and keywords section of the articles as follows: (supply chain AND composite material) OR ((supply AND chain AND composite material) AND ((wood OR fiber) OR (particulate OR flake) OR (fiberglass) OR (reinforced AND plastics) OR (polymer AND matrix) OR (ceramic AND matrix) OR (carbon AND matrix) OR (metal AND matrix))) (Fig. 1).

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Prisma framework</figcaption></figure>

The search results have been limited to the “Engineering”, “Decision Science”, “Mathematics”, “Business, Management, and Accounting”, and “Economics, Econometrics, and Finance” areas which are aligned with the objectives of this study. The subject area of “Material science” has been excluded due to most of the paper objectives in this field being to investigate the composite materials property rather than the SC. The results are restricted between journal and conference proceedings only. The result is refined based on papers published in the English language also. By applying these search filters and duplication removed, SCOPUS returned 170 documents. By evaluating the
title and the abstract section, n = 71 papers give a partial idea about the SC for compos-
ite materials. Researchers often include the term “Supply Chain” when describing their
works in the abstract section, but those works are not a proper reflection of SC research.
For example, Mahdi et al. (2021) pointed out the importance of closed loop SC in their
abstract portion, but their paper’s goal is to examine different materials properties that
can help for reusing, and recycling purposes [6]. So, after a thorough review of the
full paper for those initially down-selected, only twenty (n = 20) papers closely meet
the inclusion criteria for this study. For the bibliographic part of this study, VOSviewer
software is used, and Microsoft Excel is used for the descriptive statistics.

3 Bibliometric Analysis

3.1 Co-authorship of Countries

The collaboration among the authors from different parts of the world can be shown
from the co-authorship analysis of the countries. For the co-authorship of the countries,
a minimum two number of documents of a country is considered, where only four meet
the threshold out of 15 countries. One unanticipated finding is that other than the United
Kingdom there is no country from Europe, although the United Kingdom has the highest
number of documents (n = 12) with most number of citations (n = 107) as well.

The United Kingdom is followed by Canada (documents = 4, citations = 50, total
link strength = 4), Malaysia (documents = 2, citations = 20, total link strength = 1), and
United States (documents = 2, citations = 0, total link strength = 0) respectively. But
only three of them are connected based on the co-authorship of countries. The cluster
of the countries that are connected is shown by a different color in the Fig. 2. Scientific
collaboration plays an important role to strengthen the quality of research output. An
integrated collaboration research policy that embraces multiple policy levels like local,
national, or may be global can improve this linkage [7].

3.2 Co-authorship of Authors

Bote et al. (2013) showed that international collaboration has a great influence on the
scientific works of a country [8]. The collaboration network of the authors can be ana-
lyzed by the co-authorship analysis of authors. A minimum number of one document
and one citation of an author is considered as the threshold. Among the 45 authors, 38
meet the threshold which makes 9 clusters as shown in Fig. 2 (unconnected). Although
this study found nine clusters, they are not connected between themselves. From this, it
can be inferred that there is little collaboration among the active researchers, and most
of the work was conducted isolated from each other.
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 2.** Co-authorship analysis of countries and authors respectively</figcaption></figure>

## 3.3 Keywords

Keywords, which give the whole paper impression, so the co-occurrence of the author keywords are considered in this study. Since the final consideration number of papers is quite small (n = 20), the minimum number of occurrences of a keyword is considered as one, which results in 72 keywords. Then the identical keywords are replaced, for example, “composite”, “composites”, “carbon fiber composite”, “glass fibers”, “wood plastic composite” etc. which are replaced by the keyword “composite material”. This screening process gives 11 keywords, where the minimum number of keyword occurrences is placed at two. From this result, it can be inferred that much more research work is needed to comprehend the SC for composite materials, as the number of keyword occurrences is considered here only two. By network visualization mode, the co-occurrence of author keywords is represented in Fig. 3.

## 3.4 Bibliographic Coupling of Documents

Bibliographic coupling of documents links between the documents, where each link has a strength which is represented by the positive value. The link strength depends on this value. If the value is higher, their link strength is also better, and vice versa [9].

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 3.** Co-occurrence of author keywords and bibliographic coupling based on TLS respectively</figcaption></figure>
The minimum number of citations of a document is counted as 5 with the full counting method. It has been observed that out of 20 documents 12 meet the threshold. Figure 3 shows the largest set of connected items (n = 9), and three different clusters have been formed. The circle size and color represent the bibliographic coupling, and the cluster respectively.

# 4 In-Depth Review

For the composite wastes, Sultan and Mativenga (2019) pointed out that there is no agreement on the waste ownership of the composite materials among the stakeholders. With the exception of the take-back approach has been partially implemented in Germany, Sweden, and the UK. This presents another burning issue for the circular SC of composite materials. This is considered problematic, as there has been a forecasted growth in Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) and Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymers (GFRP) due to the manufacture of turbine blades for wind energy [11]. Some argue that the users have the responsibility for the end of life of a product who turned it into waste while in use, while others believe that the government should take over entirely [12]. On this point, Shehab et al. (2020) emphasized the establishment of a market for recycled carbon fibers [13]. Composite waste ending up in landfills is a major problem for the environment and the sustainability ambition of the composites industry. In Europe, landfills, as well as burning composites, are prohibited with strict regulation in selected countries such as Germany, Netherlands, and Finland. There has been increasing awareness of circular pathways of composites. To date, however, this is considered not to be enough. E.g., for GFRP materials recycling, the only commercial facilities in Europe are in Germany. In addition, recycled fibers do not have the same properties compared to virgin materials. For GFRP recycling, mechanical recycling is an attractive method [7]. In the UK, pyrolysis is a technique that is most often used for recycling composites. Recycling CFRP has a beneficial impact on the environment. Shuaib et al. (2015) described that the energy consumed by the pyrolysis method for recycling and remanufacturing the CFRP as less than 10% of the total energy associated with the manufacturing of virgin CFRP materials [11]. However, recycled carbon fiber has its limitations due to degradation in mechanical and surface properties [13]. Most often, it is found that the mixed-integer linear programming method was used to investigate the close loop and reverse SC of composite waste materials [7, 14]. For GFRP reverse supply network design, Rentzelas et al. (2021) suggested that the trade-off between the larger facilities with better economies of scale compared to the decentralized smaller and more facilities with low transportation costs can be the investigation scenario for the future. In their analysis, they predicted that in 2050, the demand for recycling wind blade composites could not be satisfied with the facility in the UK, rather partly will need to come from the large facility in Germany. For the reverse SC, the technology's capital cost has a great influence on the total cost as well [7]. For wood plastic composite, Doustmohammadi and Babazadeh (2020) determined the optimum material flow for the closed-loop SC network to minimize the total cost. It is somewhat surprising that the changes in the transportation cost and production cost parameter do not have a good amount of consequential effect on the total cost of their study [14]. The study
by Mondragon et al. (2018) confirmed that the use of composite materials still requires a higher cost than the use of traditional components. They proposed that the reduction of lead time, the number of suppliers, and the complexity of the SC can have a fruitful effect on the use of composite materials in the manufacturing industry [15]. Supplier or vendor selection is another crucial decision for the SCM. Hsu et al. (2012) depicted that the best vendor of recycled material has good scores on the quality of the product and environmental collaboration. Moreover, they showed that the supply risk will affect the delivery service and schedule, cost of the product, and environmental collaboration [16]. The original equipment manufacturer of composite material has multiple suppliers of its own. For minimizing the disruption risks in a SC network, multi-supplier configurations can play an important role. Interestingly, on their hypothesis, Arashpour et al. (2017) found that the multi-supplier configuration increases the total SC cost [17]. For the high-tech industries (where flexible and innovative approaches are common) to maintain the stringent standards among the different echelon of the manufacturers, authentic information and traceability are important. Mondragon et al. (2018) highlighted that with blockchain technology's public and private keys, the information flow will be enhanced among different stages of the composite materials SC [10]. Technology selection for the composite materials SC configuration is very much important. Mondragon et al. (2016) conducted a survey study to find the factors that affect the technology selection. Rapid manufacturing is the one that got the lowest average rating in their survey study among different companies [18]. But in their follow-up publication [19], the enablers who provide engineering services or training have got an above-average rating for this factor. This finding was unexpected and suggests that the factors depend on the type of suppliers also. Besides that, the green SC practice of the composite manufacturers has given them the chance to show their responsibility to the environment. Mahmood et al. (2012) indicated that quality, cost, delivery, and continuous improvement are the desired performance measures for the green SC management among their surveyed companies [20].

# 5 Limitation and Future Research

The researchers must bear in mind that this study only examined literature curated in the SCOPUS database. Although SCOPUS is considered a comprehensive, and expertly curated abstract and citation database, there are other sources of academic literature that might not have been included in this research due to this limitation. More related research articles may be available by exploring other databases such as Google Scholar, PubMed, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and so on. By gathering and analyzing the data, a comparison can be done among different databases. Some of the bibliometric analysis that is presented here, is not the only limited options for investigating this topic. Future research can be done by incorporating a large spectrum of search terminology from the combined database results to make the meta-analysis like the dimension reduction of the text data mining, finding the co-relations, and clustering them. This study pointed out some future research works on the following subjects but are not limited to:

* How to improve the resiliency of the multi-echelon composite materials SC?
* How to improve the efficiency of materials and information flow by the use of digital technology like blockchain, big data analytics, etc. for the composite materials SC?

* What will be the optimal composite materials SC network design for high-tech flexible products?

* Sourcing strategies for composite materials.

* What are the demand variabilities of the composite wastes for the closed-loop SC network?

* Coordination mechanism for the forward and reverse SC of composite materials.

* System dynamic analysis of the composite materials SC

* Optimization of the distribution network

* Cascading failure or domino-effect analysis of composite materials SC.

* How to improve the sustainable resource utilization and the green SC of composite materials?

* Information sharing and coordination of composite materials SC

* Enhancing the SC performance including the cost optimization

* Composite SC disruptions, and recovery policy analysis

* Recycling and circular SC path analysis of the composite materials.

* Market demand analysis for the recycled composite materials

# 6 Conclusion

The use of composite materials is booming around the world, and the complexity of its SC is also increasing. Surprisingly, there is not enough scientific literature on this field. Most of the articles are survey-based and focused on the optimization of the material flows among the different echelon of the suppliers. In recent days, some of the papers which investigated the SC network design for the end life of certain composite materials like wind blades are the first of their kind. So, there is a huge opportunity for the research community to develop and contribute to the composite materials SC or related fields. Collaboration among the wider range of research community, and between researchers with industry is also required to improve this research field in the upcoming days.

**Acknowledgements.** The authors thank Drs. Hota Gangarao and Rakesh Gupta, both from WVU, for their support and valuable input. Furthermore, ACMA and Dan Coughlin for the valuable discussion and inspiration to investigate the topic.

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