Purpose: Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) methods identify cause factors in green supply chain management (GSCM). This study argues that the target method treats affecting factors as unique themes; however, various factors may be mutually antagonistic (i.e., mutually positive or negative) or encompass other meaningful information (e.g., gain/risk, intensify/depress). The factor affecting GSCM implicitly encompasses the economy and ecology (greenness), which may conflict. This new approach can be integrated into the analysis, dividing affecting factors into "cause" and "effect" groups. The organization should focus on affecting factors in the cause group. The findings provide strategic guidance for organizations to practice GSCM.
Design/methodology/approach: A duo-theme cloud model DEMATEL approach was proposed to divide these affecting factors of GSCM into "economy" and "greenness." The cloud model was applied to overcome the ambiguity and randomness in the concept of uncertainty and allow the integration of mutual qualitative and quantitative mapping.
Findings: Six factors in the economic aspect and four in the greenness aspect should be classified as the cause group.
Practical implications: Organizations should prioritize these ten factors in their GSCM practices. Doing so makes the GSCM problem relatively straightforward and allows for efficacious decision-making.
Originality/value: This study proposes a duo-theme cloud model DEMATEL approach to identify cause factors in GSCM.
Copyright: © 2024 Chen, Tseng. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.