Prioritizing Barriers for Reverse Logistics of Lubricating Oils using Fuzzy AHP

To minimize waste and maintain efficient resource utilization, companies bring back their used products, which have reached their end of useful life, also called EOL (End of Life) products and materials from the customers, to the proper disposal point. The Reverse Logistics (RL) practiced by developed countries are still far from developing countries. However, the population and industrial development has rapidly increased, and the challenges in handling End of Life (EOL) products and materials are immense. With global competition, sustainable development, thrust on efficient resource utilization, and environmental concerns, industries in developing countries are forced to adopt RL practices. In the Indian context, studies on RL barriers are confined to electronics, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, manufacturing, and retail chains. This paper identifies the RL barriers in the lubricant oil industry using MCDM methods and ranks the barriers found in the literature in the Indian context. This study identified 20 barriers in 11 groups and ranked the criteria along with the Sub-criteria with the help of the expert panel. The final ranking of the barriers indicates that infrastructural barriers, including storage and transportation, are the most important in implementing RL in the lubricant industry, followed by economic barriers. Lack of motivation and reward, a cultural barrier, comes out as the third most significant barrier. The findings have academic, managerial implication, and policy implications.