Sustainability assessment of food chain logistics

Environmental Sustainability in Third-Party Logistics Service Providers: A Systematic Literature Review from 2000–2016

“…Interestingly, Palsson and Kovács (2014) [50] highlighted how the company profitability and the long-term competitive advantage positively trigger the green actions' adoption. On the contrary, the few papers focusing on the economic-financial barriers found that the main economic-financial barriers are the high investment costs and the lack of financial resources requested to implement green activities (Bloemhof et al, 2015;Perotti et al, 2015) [51,52]. More specifically, Pålsson and Johansson (2016) [55] found that high investment costs mainly act as a barrier for some green actions, such as using closer suppliers and relocating production plants and warehouses, rather than for other actions, such as eco-driving and traffic control technologies.…”

“…Considering the internal influencing forces, the organizational aspects are the most investigated factors, and they mainly regard the quality of human resources (i.e., employee skills), the management's involvement in the sustainability practices and the general environmental culture of the company. The vast majority of studies focused on the quality of human resources, which was found to significantly support the adoption of green actions in all the studies ( [13,45,49,51], whereas the management pressures had no significant impact on the green actions' adoption (Lieb and Lieb, 2010a; Palsson and Kovács, 2014) [11,50]. Other studies focused on the general environmental culture of the companies, such as the "corporate desire to do the right thing" (Lieb and Lieb, 2010a) [11] and the environmental awareness (Bloemhof et al, 2015;Salhieh and Abushaikha, 2016) [51,53].…”

“…Two papers only (Rossi et al, 2013; Bloemhof et al, 2015) [48,51] focused on economic-financial drivers and barriers simultaneously. These studies found both a triggering effect of cost saving and a detrimental effect of high investment costs underlying the environmental actions.…”

“…All these studies found that the companies' culture has a positive impact on the adoption of environmental sustainability strategies. Only a few papers analyzed the organizational barriers, such as the lack of competence and motivation of employees (Perotti et al, 2015; Palsson and Johansson, 2016) [52,55], missing or wrong information sharing among the company departments and the cultural aspects in the collaborative environmental activities (Bloemhof et al, 2015) [51].…”

“…Some studies (Lin and Ho, 2011;Ho and Lin, 2012) [13,47] found that the green actions' adoption has been hindered by the general environmental uncertainty rather than by specific customer pressures. Bloemhof et al (2015) [51] analyzed various barriers related to the market, such as the contract terms with clients, the characteristic of the industry and the economic crisis, and any influence on the 3PLs environmental strategy has not been found. Perotti et al (2015) [52] found that the main barrier for 3PLs operating at the national level was the scarce interest in green products and services by their customers and suppliers.…”