Proceedings of the International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Manila, Philippines, March 7-9, 2023 However, paper and pulp making process is highly unsustainable, capable of disrupting the environmental fabric of the society. Major threats emerging out of a paper making business are deforestation, hazardous chemical effluents, heavy fuel consumption etc., all contributing to proliferation of carbon dioxide and other GHGs. Wood is a major raw material for paper industry (Kulkarni 2013). Deforestation is one of the most direct and obvious source of carbon gas emission. Most of the GHG emitted from paper and pulp industry is CO 2 (Jauhar et al. 2015). Atmospheric emission of CO 2 and chloroform, comprising of the major greenhouse gases, is a prime contributor to global warming (Setthasakko 2010). In order to counter the increasing threat of global warming, reduction in industrial usage of energy is most essential as human use of fossil fuel is a significant contributor to the global warming (IPCC 2014). Being energy efficient is the primary solution in the present scenario to arrest global CO 2 emission (Cullen and Allwood 2010; Carrillo-Hermosilla et al. 2009; Ragsdell 2000). It is predicted that about half of the cumulative emission reductions, required to meet the 2 o C target, can be met by improving energy-efficiency (IEA 2011). Other essential natural resources exploited extensively in a paper production process are energy and water, primarily for steam generation and electricity production (Setthasakko 2010). Paper and pulp industry is world’s fifth-leading consumer of energy (Jauhar et al. 2015). Being a capital and resource-intensive industry, the pulp and paper industry contributes adversely to the environmental sustainability causing greenhouse emission, human toxicity, ecological toxicity, water contamination and others (Blazejczak and Edler 2000; Pineda-Henson et al. 2002). Taking cognizance of the adverse impact of the pulp and paper making process and sharp scrutiny of the social community and the governments alike, practices of sustainable supply chain to mitigate negative impact caused by unsustainable production systems are finding space (Das 2018; Ghadge et al. 2018; Beckmann et al. 2014; Meckenstock et al. 2016). Being sustainable only in the bottom line is no longer a measure of a firm’s image, rather it is measured by its performance towards all-encompassing sustainable activity (Barbosa-Povoa et al. 2018; Zhang and Anjali 2014). With even the supply chain partners becoming aware of the importance of triple bottom line (TBL) performance, it is in the interest of every business unit, irrespective of whether it is a supplier or manufacturer or customer, to ensure that it adheres to some practice of sustainable business operations, if it intends to continue its business growth. So, given the adverse impact that a paper and pulp industry have on the environment and the human sustenance, it becomes very relevant to explore the issues of sustainability in one of the unsustainable industries, i.e., paper and pulp industry, prevailing in the academic world and the society in more depth. This is where the focus of the current article lies. 1.1 Objectives Accordingly, the research questions this paper pursues to address are: RQ1. What is the present status of academic discourse on sustainability in paper and pulp industry? RQ2. What are the challenges of sustainability throughout the paper making process impacting the paper and pulp industry? Through this paper, the author intends to present the pressing issues of sustainability in the paper and pulp industry, as discussed in the literature, through a bibliometric analysis and highlight some of the pressing challenges which emerge out of the same. The flow of this paper is described thus: Section.2 describes the research methodology adopted for the study and the details of the process followed for literature search and literature selection. Section.3 discusses the data analysis modules adopted for the present study. Section.4 interprets the results out of the bibliometric analysis to make some meaningful inferences, discusses some of the sustainability related challenges concerning ecological issues of the paper making industry emerging out of the existing literature and proposes some improvement areas. Section.5 concludes the present study with some future research directions under “Conclusion”. 2. Research Methodology The first research objective stated for this paper is analysed through a bibliometric study of the prevailing literature on paper and pulp industry to get an outlook on the depth of the academic discourse on sustainable, or rather unsustainable, practices in this industry. Bibliometric tools aid in tracing the evolution of sustainability as well as to identify emerging research focus within the domain of interest (Ertz & Leblanc-Proulx 2018). Through bibliometric analysis, various properties of knowledge domains can be understood with the help of mathematical and statistical outcomes (Mora et al. 2017).It is a scientific method of synthesizing scientific literature to identify new and rich areas in business research (Donthu et al. 2021). The second research objective is to identify the specific challenges of sustainability pertaining to pulp and paper industry. In order to achieve the said objective, content analysis of important and relevant literature on the extant topic was conducted since this technique allows replication and making valid inferences from texts or other meaning matters within any given context (Krippendorff 2004). Bengtsson (2016) says that qualitative content analysis aids in extracting meaningful data from literature and draw
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