Green Logistics and Transportation

For more than a decade, business-to-consumer parcel deliveries have been growing rapidly. Despite this, the ‘last mile’ of the supply chain, which involves the final physical transfer of goods to the customer, is particularly problematic for many customers, as delivery times are often unpredictable and/or not convenient. An increasingly prevalent alternative to conventional delivery is the collection/delivery point (CDP), where parcels are delivered to a CDP of the customers’ choosing, and picked up at a more convenient time. From an environmental perspective, CDPs can reduce failed deliveries and allow consolidation of the delivery schedules. However, a full environmental assessment should also consider the customers’ movements required to make the pickups. In this chapter, competing delivery and pickup offerings are framed in terms of the utility that each provide to the customer. A random parameter error components logit model is estimated, using stated choice survey data, to uncover what is influencing the choice of these market offerings. The last mile alternatives investigated extend beyond a pickup-conventional delivery dichotomy, to include alternative CDP locations, pickup access modes, and ways in which the pickups might be integrated into existing travel. We find that changing the price, quality and location of the CDP and delivery offerings can disproportionately influence more environmentally friendly means of picking up from CDPs, such as walking, cycling, and integrating the pickup into an existing car trip. This provides the groundwork for a more complete, behaviourally informed quantification of the last mile parcel delivery and pickup environmental footprint.

Greening of supply chain operations is best to be addressed at the network design phase where strategic facility location, technology and transport mode decisions are made. This has been an important area of research focus for almost a decade now. Given the increasing frequency and intensity of disruptive events facing today’s organizations, the greening analyses of supply chains need to take into consideration how the economic and environmental performance of the supply chain can be affected in the face of unanticipated disruptions. Thus, static greening analysis is simplistic and achieving a truly green supply chain requires a dynamic analysis to develop robust supply chains whose sustainability performance remains unaffected or only lightly affected by disruptions of various types. This chapter presents a framework and optimization model for dynamic sustainability analysis. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the application of the approach in performing tradeoff analysis in business-as-usual and disruption circumstances.

There are many complicated and challenging urban freight transport problems which result in high logistics costs, negative environmental impacts, unsafe traffic conditions, and high energy consumption. The behaviour of the multiple stakeholders involved in urban freight transport needs to take into account for creating efficient and environmentally friendly and safe urban freight transport systems. City logistics has been proposed to achieve the goals of mobility, sustainability, and liveability by balancing the smart growth of economy and cleaner, safer and quieter environment. This chapter addresses the definition of city logistics, the driving forces of technical innovations and behaviour change of stakeholders, the governance of public sectors for providing a better framework for city logistics. The modelling techniques highlight how to describe problems and evaluate policy measures for decision support. Future perspectives relating to co-modality, home health care, and disasters are also given.

One effective approach to improve the environmental burdens of logistics and transport operations is to ensure that evaluation and selection of transportation vehicles for organizations incorporate green attributes. The availability of different types of vehicles with varying performance characteristics as well as the breadth of environmental performance metrics have made the transport fleet decision making more complex and dynamic. This chapter presents a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach, integrating Rough Set theory and VIKOR method, for sustainable transportation vehicles selection. First, the related sustainability attributes are identified from the existing literature to be added to the conventional performance-based and economic vehicle evaluation criteria. The MCDM approach is then used for ranking and selecting the sustainable transportation vehicles. A numerical example is finally presented to illustrate the application of the proposed approach.

Carbon emissions from supply chain operations are extensively contributing to the global warming. Sustainable supply chain management literature has seen more emphasis on greening of production operations and designing of greener supply networks, considering transportation emissions as “necessary evil”. This chapter aims to investigate the economic and environmental consequences of transport routing decisions in a supply chain with vertical collaboration, for instance through Vendor Managed Inventory. An optimization model and solution method is presented for an Inventory Pollution-Routing Problem (IPRP) in which inventory and transportation costs and emissions as well as demand uncertainty concerns are explicitly incorporated. The proposed model can be used to explore possible tradeoffs between emissions costs and operational costs for green inventory routing decision making. A set of computational tests are designed for performance benchmark of the proposed model and solution method.

Freight vehicles contribute a substantial amount to the environmental impacts within cities. There are several emerging engine and alternative fuel technologies that have the potential to reduce the fossil fuel consumption as well as to improve the air quality within urban areas. Larger capacity vehicles allow more freight to be carried with less vehicles and can significantly reduce the amount of freight traffic and emissions. City Logistics schemes provide an opportunity for promoting innovative vehicle technologies. Partnerships between the public and private sectors can lead to solutions that lower the environmental and financial costs for freight transport. This chapter outlines a range of technologies and city logistics schemes that can improve the environmental performance of urban freight systems.

It is well known that a significant amount to passenger trip activity involves multiple modes, destinations and trip purposes. For example, with multi-worker households, we observe a car commuter taking a child to a child care centre en route to work and also dropping their partner off at another location such as a railway station. This example is one of many trip chain configurations that represent the complexity of travel activity, and which have important implications on how we represent travel demand in transport planning models. What is not well understood is the impact that trip chaining has on greening the demand chain. We are unaware of any studies that have investigated the greening of passenger demand chains associated with the complexity of trip chains. This chapter uses the Sydney Household Travel Survey and an econometric model to identify the impact that the changing nature of trip chains has on CO₂ emission. Results suggest that trip chains were stable in Sydney over a period of 15-year from 1997/98 to 2011/12. Emissions saving from chaining multiple activities into a single chain were found to vary between 5 and 19 % depending on whether the mode of travel is car, bus, or train.

Port operations and maritime logistics represent major sources of air pollution. Given the recent greening initiatives and developments in this area and correspondingly a geometric growth in the number of academic publications, this chapter aims to (a) provide some statistics of the key journals, authors and institutions that have contributed to the field, and (b) identify the primary research topics investigated. The proposed literature classification and analysis can help interested researchers and students establish their research agendas in this emerging area of study and investigation.

In recent years slow steaming has resurfaced as a fuel saving measure allowing ship owners to significantly cut operational costs. Reduced fuel consumption leads to lower levels of greenhouse gases and pollutant emissions. Port authorities have considered offering incentives to ship operators that significantly reduce sailing speed in the port proximity, as a means to improve local air quality. This chapter conducts a literature review on emissions modelling methodologies for maritime transport and develops a framework that allows the estimation of pollutant emissions under different sailing scenarios. The chapter presents existing regulations and port initiatives that aim to reduce maritime emissions. The merits of localised slow steaming near the calling port for various case studies including different ship size, trip distance, sailing speed and fuel policies in place are examined. An activity based methodology is used to estimate fuel consumption and emissions savings during lower sailing speed operation for machinery on-board. Fuel price and the value of time lost govern the extent to which slow steaming and local speed reductions can be effective. The economic and environmental trade-offs occurring at different sailing speeds are discussed from the perspective of both the ship operator and the port authority considering the implications of regulatory policies such as the expansion of Emission Control Areas (ECA). The chapter concludes with a set of guidelines to port authorities on designing attractive speed reduction programmes, and recommendations to shipping companies on improving fuel efficiency across their schedule when such programmes are available.

The sustainability of aviation in global supply chains is of increasing importance to airline management and policy makers. With mounting environmental pressures and market volatilities, airlines need to find strategies for simultaneously managing their economic and environmental (emissions) performance, two objectives that can support but also contradict each other. This chapter aims to evaluate the relative performance of airlines’ carbon and cost efficiency and how this relationship has changed over time. We compute and compare the carbon efficiency of 14 major European airlines for the period of 1986–2007. As jet fuel is the most important resource in the aviation supply chain, we examine whether there is a relationship between fuel prices and carbon efficiency. We also test whether unit cost, distance flown and load factors have an impact on airline carbon efficiency. The results show that the fuel prices and their volatility have affected and improved carbon efficiency of airlines. Our findings also confirm previous anecdotal evidence suggesting a significant negative relationship between carbon efficiency and unit cost.

The field of green supply chain management is rapidly growing and maturing. Significant room still exists for development in the field including those identified in this book in the context of green logistics and transportation. In this chapter we briefly review some of the important directions for future research in three areas of (1) green logistics network development, (2) green land transportation, and (3) green air and water transportation.