The concept of circular economy (CE), a recent popular global business trend, considerably minimizes waste and environmental pollution. However, studies exploring CE practices in the context of leather industry have been scant. To deal with this issue, this paper proposes a decision support framework for evaluating the challenges to CE practices in the context of leather industry. Best worst method, a generic decision support tool, is employed in the assessment process. The study findings reveal that “lack of financial support from authorities” is assigned the highest weight in the final ranking results. This indicates that the lack of financial facility poses a major challenge to the successful implementation of CE practices. The findings can assist industrial managers and authorities in taking the required actions to implement CE practices in the leather industry for the sustainable development of the leather sector.

A truly sustainable organization needs to take the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainability into account. Although the economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability have been examined by many scholars and practitioners, thus far, the social dimension has been received less attention in literature and in practice, in particular in developing countries. Social sustainability enables other sustainability initiatives and overlooking this dimension can have a serious adverse impact across supply chains. To address this issue, this study proposes a framework for investigating the social sustainability of supply chains in manufacturing companies. To show the applicability and efficiency of the proposed framework, a sample of 38 experts was used to evaluate and prioritize social sustainability criteria, using a multi-criteria decision-making method called the ‘best worst method’ (BWM). The criteria are ranked according to their average weight obtained through BWM. The respondents view ‘contractual stakeholders influence’ as the most important social sustainability criterion. The results of this study help industry managers, decision-makers and practitioners decide where to focus their attention during the implementation stage, to increase social sustainability in their organizational supply chain and move towards sustainable development.