Charting Sustainable Routes: Exploring Green Logistics and Its Future

"The Era of Sustainability: Transforming Logistics for a Green Future" In recent years, environmental care has become an important concern for society. This pursuit to improve our environmental footprint, with the goal of achieving sustainable economic growth, particularly applies to the logistics sector. More and more companies are trying to combat this growing concern by reducing the environmental impact of their supply chain. However, these changes often present companies with a challenge: How can I be more environmentally friendly without affecting my business? Green Logistics: definition and challenges It involves considering a company's environmental footprint when organizing its logistics. It applies to the entire supply chain and its goal is to reduce the company's impact on the environment without affecting its economic activity. This is achieved through more or less substantial changes in a company's logistics activity, whether through the choice of suppliers, infrastructure, route optimization, storage, sustainable transportation, or eco-friendly packaging. What are green logistics solutions? There are several ways to implement green logistics. These are the 5 main green logistics solutions that can be applied in your company's supply chain: Transportation: Refers to choosing vehicles that consume less energy, such as heavy-duty trucks running on natural gas, and opting for trains or ships when possible. Transportation is probably the main source of environmental pollution in logistics. Therefore, reducing emissions is a priority for companies. Storage: Optimizing warehouses to consume less energy by installing low-consumption lighting or using sustainable building materials. Storage is one of the pillars of logistics. Packaging: Prioritizing the use of packaging made from recycled or biodegradable materials, reducing package sizes, and eliminating unnecessary packaging. Packaging also plays a crucial role in logistics. Therefore, it's important to optimize it for recycling and reuse. Optimization: Improving transport routes to limit kilometers traveled, planning trips to avoid empty runs, and thus reducing the number of trips. Therefore, it appears there are many solutions to implement green logistics. But what about future solutions? What is the future of green logistics? There are several possible answers here... It seems undeniable that the future of green logistics depends on supply chain automation, a trend that has been widely observed in recent years. Logistics 4.0 is likely to continue developing, with the use of artificial intelligence, information digitization, and robotization. All these automated solutions favor green logistics by limiting the use of polluting energies. Therefore, it's likely that green logistics, already established today, will continue to develop further in the future with the development of Logistics 4.0 and the current environmental situation.