According to the European Environment Agency, about 25% of CO2 emissions in Spain come from the logistics and transport sector. Therefore, to talk about sustainable logistics is a necessity. There is no doubt that both the logistics chain and everything related to the packaging of products and goods generate a huge amount of waste. Reuse and recycling are two of the basic pillars to be more efficient.
However, the great challenge to make logistics more sustainable and meet environmental commitments has a lot to do with transport. Of course, one of the priority actions is to renew the fleets with vehicles and means that significantly reduce CO2 levels.
But there is an extremely important aspect that is essential to achieve a decisive decrease in the environmental impact: improving the efficiency of transport itself or, consequently, transporting more products with fewer resources.
In this sense, one of the main strategies is to optimize and plan routes to make the most of resources. This is achieved by, for example, making the same truck to unload and load goods successively at all points on its route: the supplier, the warehouse and the store. In this way, the trucks always travel full and a much more efficient distribution is achieved, making the most of all the resources.
Another action that encourages a more sustainable logistics is to bring suppliers closer to the logistics blocks or to build logistics blocks so that the average distance that trucks travel between warehouse-supplier or warehouse-store is the minimum possible.
A commitment to intermodal transport must also be a priority. The volume of goods transported by train and ship is increased for those products that, because of their weight or volume, would require a large number of trucks for distribution. Thus, the environmental impact is considerably reduced.