► Developed a carbon footprint based reverse logistics network design model. ► Proposed model is tested with various test problems. ► Proposed model is validated with a case study from plastic sector. Due to the environmental legislation and regulations, manufacturing firms have realized the importance of adopting environmental friendly supply chain management (SCM) practices. In this paper, a mixed integer linear model is developed for a carbon footprint based reverse logistics network design. The proposed model aims at minimizing climate change (specifically, the CO2 footprint), and it employs reverse logistics activities to recover used products, hence combining the location/transportation decision problem. The proposed model is validated by examining a case study from the plastic sector.