Sustainability in the Transport and Logistics Sector: Lacking Environmental Measures

Abstract

Sustainability as part of the development of companies' business strategies is gaining in importance. Due to its impact on the environment, this is particularly essential for companies of the transport and logistics sector. This paper explores several factors that influence the environmental behaviour of transport and logistics companies in Austria. It discusses the importance of the economic impact on environmental management decision in detail and analyses the sector's specific characteristics in terms of environmental behavior. A case‐based approach involving multiple field studies with face‐to‐face expert interviews and secondary data analysis was used to evaluate environmental performance and specific practices. Using selected cases, we will demonstrate how environmental measures contribute to overall business performance and draw general conclusions regarding the transport and logistics sector. Furthermore, suggestions are given as to how the government can further support transport and logistics companies in this regard. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

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

“…Impact of green actions on 3PLs' performance [3,38,40,41,56,61,[66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80].…”

“…The importance for 3PLs to be energy efficient in transportation has been found by a number of other papers. Oberhofer and Dieplinger (2014) [3] found that energy-efficient vehicles is one of the most used measures in the sample of logistics companies they analyzed in Austria. Similarly, the findings of Evangelista (2014) [25] showed that energy efficiency measures were used by the Italian 3PL companies having a higher level of green concern.…”

“…The latter have been further categorized in papers dealing with the impact on environmental performance [3,122] and papers dealing with economic and financial performance and operational performance [38,123]. Table 7.…”

“…For example, Facanha and Horvath (2005) [56] used the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of an automobile to show that the outsourcing of logistics to 3PLs provides better opportunities to improve environmental performance in terms of reducing energy use, global warming potential and fatalities in comparison with the management of logistics in-house. Oberhofer and Dieplinger (2014) [3] identified a number of green actions and provided for each of them a quantitative measure of their environmental performance in terms of GHG emissions saved often compared with the cost of investments. Based on this, the authors found relevant differences between the 3PLs analyzed, distinguishing between proactive and reactive environmental behavior.…”

“…The concept of sustainability is based on the integration of social, economic and environmental pillars that are broadly known as the triple-bottom-line (Elkington, 1999) [2]. From the business and management perspective, the environmental dimension of the sustainability concept involves all activities and decisions necessary to minimize the environmental pollution caused by a company (Oberhofer and Dieplinger, 2014) [3]. The need to reduce the negative impact on the environment has become a significant priority for companies operating in supply chains due to several factors such as government regulators' pressures [4], concerns about the scarcity of critical energy resources [5] and the increase of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions [6].…”