Measuring Environmental Sustainability at Logistics Hubs: An International Benchmark of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Within logistics operations, sustainable warehousing has achieved increasing attention among academics and practitioners. Practitioners like Logistics Service Providers (LSPs) have started to perceive the need for measuring the environmental performance of their logistics hubs and searching for practices and solutions towards greener warehousing processes. Besides, a rising number of academic contributions have emerged addressing sustainable warehousing, especially from a conceptual viewpoint. However, empirical evidence is still lacking on the assessment of warehouse environmental performance, and very few studies offer an in-depth discussion on the quantification of operational greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at logistics hubs. This paper aims at addressing this research gap. Based on an extensive international market study the paper discusses some preliminary results on energy efficiency and GHG emissions at logistics hubs. Specifically, an initial international benchmark between Italy and Germany is offered in terms of consumption and emission figures split by features of the logistics hub, thus paving the way to the definition of an initial set of relevant GHG emission indicator values that can be taken into account for measuring the sustainability performance of European logistics hubs.