Reducing transportation CO₂ emissions through pooling of supply networks: perspectives from a case study in French retail chains

Abstract

Consolidation of shipments is an old subject in logistics, however as the supply chain concept spreads amongst firms, a few of them are still thinking about using collaboration to reduce the environmental logistic footprint. How much reduction will there be in CO2 emissions if members of a supply chain start a collaboration to share supply networks? First, we present the difference between well-known consolidation principles and the proposed concept of logistical network pooling; then we apply this difference to several scenarios. As they were driven by logistical data from real firms, they represent a good estimate of the potential savings from emissions. The main finding of this research is a potential saving of at least 25% of CO2 emissions from pooled networks versus the current setup. Also discussed are the other effects of the different scenarios on delivery frequencies and collaboration viability.