The purpose of the paper is to review the practice of the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ) in Green Supply Chain (GSC) problems and to identify new research challenges focusing on the question: "To what extent is it necessary to evolve TRIZ tools, methods and theoretical grounding for addressing GSC inventive problems?" First, a review of the past contributions of TRIZ based methods to GSC problem resolution is presented. As the result of the papers review did not provide a comprehensive understanding of the limitations and areas of potential application of TRIZ in GSC, three experiments were conducted to complete the literature review, in order to provide a more comprehensive answer to the posed question and identify research challenges. The experiments addressing GSC problems were also conducted to explore to what extent the more mature meta-methods of classical TRIZ, namely ARIZ 85 A, C and the related sub-methods, can be used as in GSM problems. The examples were chosen to explore types of GSC problems that were not yet addressed with TRIZ. The experiment results highlight limitations on the use of the TRIZ in GSC inventive problems, which were not mentioned in the GSC literature. Moreover it highlights the limitation of using the more mature meta-methods of TRIZ (ARIZ 85A and ARIZ 85C) when the conflict to overcome contains more than two evaluation parameters and one action parameter. Finally, research challenges to overcome the limitations and to improve the use of TRIZ in GSC inventive problems are stated. Among them, methods for quickly establishing the existence of classical TRIZ contradictions or for informing the problem solver when no TRIZ contradictions are present in a given inventive problem in GSC should be proposed. Such methods would permit determining whether ARIZ 85C could be used and avoid a long and fruitless search for a system of contradictions. Find alternatives to the algorithms proposed in the past to be able to establish the generalized contradictions of inventive problems. Make evolve meta-methods ARIZ 85C or substitute it with methods which can address the inventive problems that cannot be treated by ARIZ 85C. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.