Risk evaluation for sustainable packaging logistics solution: A quantitative method and case study

Abstract

Packaging's impact on sustainability does not solely reflect on itself at product level like traditional product, but instead, the interaction between different packaging layers and between packaging and logistic activities are considered to have significant impact on logistics performance along the supply chain [1, 2]. Also, as the interface between logistics operation, end user and packed product [3], packaging is tightly related to the effectiveness safety and risk of logistic operations and the cargo. Therefore, the packaging logistics researches emphasises the packaging and logistics interactions could not be ignored when evaluating the sustainability of packaging. However, existing researches in this field only qualitatively provide suggestions to packaging design considerations. In this paper, an evaluation framework is proposed for packaging logistics sustainability, and a quantitative method is developed to evaluate the packaging with logistic activities from a holistic view to provide suggestion to packaging and logistics design decision with quantitative scale. After that, a case study to compare the sustainability of two different packaging is conducted using the proposed method.