Designing and evaluating sustainable logistics networks

Consumers and legislation have pushed companies to re-design their logistic networks in order to mitigate negative environmental impacts. The objective in the design of logistic networks has changed, therefore, from cost minimization only, to cost and environmental impact minimization. The objective of this paper is to develop a framework for the design and evaluation of sustainable logistic networks, in which profitability and environmental impacts are balanced. In this paper, we review the main activities affecting environmental performance and cost efficiency in logistic networks, we show the advantages of using multi-objective programming (MOP) to design sustainable networks, we present the expected computational difficulties of using the MOP approach in the design of sustainable networks, and we introduce a technique, based on the commonalities between data envelopment analysis (DEA) and MOP, to evaluate the efficiency of existing logistic networks. The European pulp and paper industry will be used to illustrate our findings.