Green Logistics: Improving the Environmental Sustainability of Logistics

Front Cover
Alan C. McKinnon, Michael Browne, Anthony E. Whiteing
Kogan Page, 2012 - Business & Economics - 377 pages


As concern for the environment rises, companies must take more account of the external costs of logistics associated mainly with climate change, air pollution, noise, vibration and accidents. Green Logistics analyzes the environmental consequences of logistics and how to deal with them. Speaking to company managers and policy makers around the world, McKinnon and his co-editors compile 17 contributions from leading experts that examine the environmental consequences of the logistics relating to the transportation, storage, and handling of products as they move from source to sale. The focus is achieving a more sustainable balance between economic, environmental, and social objectives. It examines key areas in this important subject including:

-carbon auditing of supply chains
-transferring freight to greener transport modes
-reducing the environmental impact of warehousing
-improving fuel efficiency in freight transportation
-making city logistics more environmentally sustainable
-reverse logistics for the management of waste
-the role of the government in promoting sustainable logistics

The second edition adds new case studies and has been fully updated with new content on freight transportation, warehousing, vehicle utilization and the impact of ecommerce.

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About the author (2012)

Alan McKinnon is Professor of Logistics at Kühne Logistics University, Hamburg. He has been researching and teaching freight transport and logistics for almost forty years and has published extensively in journals and books. He was a member of the European Commission's High Level Group on Logistics, Chairman of the World Economic Forum's Logistics and Supply Chain Industry Council and a lead author of the transport chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fifth assessment report. He has spent many years researching the links between logistics and climate change and been an adviser to governments, international organizations and companies on this topic. Michael Browne was appointed professor at the University of Gothenburg in 2015. His main research focus is on urban logistics and he provides academic leadership in the Urban Freight Platform, a University of Gothenburg and Chalmers initiative supported by the Volvo Research and Education Foundations (VREF). He is also a member of the VREF Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems (CoE-SUFS) led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is committed to engaging practitioners and policymakers with the research community on all aspects of logistics impacting on future urban goods transport. Before his appointment in Gothenburg he was at the University of Westminster in London for 25 years and he continues to chair the Central London Freight Quality Partnership. He is a visiting professor at the University Paris II (Panthe ́on-Assas) and the University of Southampton. Anthony Whiteing is a Senior Lecturer in the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds. His main areas of expertise are in freight transport economics, distribution, logistics and supply chain management. An academic with some 30 years experience, he has been involved in a wide range of UK and European research projects primarily in the field of freight transport, and is the Principal Investigator on the 'Green Logistics' research project.