GREEN LOGISTICS PRACTICES AND PERFORMANCE: A REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Abstract

Transportation and distribution activities are major contributors to resource consumption
and environmental degradation within organizations. Emissions from vehicles and related
organizational actions contribute to air emissions that can cause environmental implications
like smoke within the location, acid rain in the region and global climate change. As
environmental concerns are gradually attracting public attention, widespread
implementation of a clean-technology for delivery vehicles has been of significant importance
for practitioners in the logistics industry. The movement towards the green logistics concept
is a part of reducing the environmental impact of organizations. As firms implement the
green logistics concept, they should also be able to see the business sense in it, in that it will
aid them to make greater sales margins. The objective of this paper is to come up with a
detailed empirical literature review on green logistics practices and performance. The
empirical review shows that little has been done to specifically look at greening the logistics
part of the supply chain which is critical because of its emission levels which are way above
any other part of the supply chain. Very few studies have been done to establish the link
between green logistics practice and the performance of the organization, and the few which
have been done have not linked the two. Therefore, today’s organizations have not gotten a
clear picture of the benefits which accrue due to the greening effort in their logistics
activities and how this affects their environmental, economic and even social performance.
Key research gaps emerging from the paper include; No enough research on the link between
green logistics practices and performance; consideration of carrying out research in a
developing country context; use of actual and more objective data on variables measuring
firm performance instead of relying on respondents’ perception to measure performance and
lastly research that does not have a purely positivist approach but a realism one.
Keywords: green logistics; environmental performance; economic performance; social
performance; organizational performance.