Resilient Supplier Selection and Closed-Loop Logistics for Inland Waterway Navigation Hubs Under ESG Constraints

Large inland waterway infrastructure projects are increasingly exposed to supply disruptions, logistics uncertainty, carbon-control pressure, and dredged-material management challenges. Although resilient supplier selection, closed-loop supply chains, and ESG-oriented optimization have been widely studied, existing models rarely integrate resilient sourcing, hub configuration, forward material supply, reverse dredged-material resourceization, and social externality penalties within a unified maritime infrastructure decision framework. To fill this gap, this study proposes an ESG-endogenous closed-loop supply-chain optimization model for construction of an inland waterway navigation hub. The model jointly optimizes resilient supplier selection, transshipment/resourceization hub activation, equipment deployment, forward material flows, and reverse dredged-material flows. Three objectives are considered: minimizing economic cost, minimizing carbon emissions, and maximizing net social benefit. In particular, a social benefit and ecological-debt penalty function is introduced to quantify the transition from beneficial reuse to disposal-related negative externalities. NSGA-II is adopted as a multi-objective solver, with parameter calibration, convergence analysis, and benchmark comparison used to evaluate computational performance. The Pinglu Canal project is used as a case study. The results produce 14 Pareto-optimal solutions and show that the lowest-cost and lowest-emission configurations may still generate negative social benefits. A low-cost ESG transition region around 197.3–197.8 million CNY is identified, where limited additional investment can activate resourceization pathways and shift the system from ecological debt to near-saturated social benefit. These findings suggest that sustainable infrastructure planning should move beyond isolated cost or carbon minimization and instead identify balanced supplier–hub–equipment–flow configurations that jointly support resilience, circularity, and ESG performance.