Green Logistics

In the article “Green Logistics” the authors talk about what exactly green logistics is and how it impacts the industry as a whole. According to the article green logistics is defined as “Supply chain management practices and strategies that reduce the environmental and energy footprint of freight distribution. It focuses on material handling, waste management, packaging and transport.” Now the article also talks about the recent concern with the environment in the past years and how it has opened a whole new subsector in logistics called “reverse logistics”. Reverse logistics is much more than just Green Logistics as was talked about earlier in this paper, but Green Logistics is another sub sector of Reverse Logistics. The article also talks about factors affect Green Logistics such as costs, time, reliability, warehousing, and information technologies. The overall purpose of logistics is to reduce cost and in particular transportation costs and it is all of these factors needing to be up to date and equipped with the latest information to ensure that a company’s green logistics program is a success. It also talks about three different approaches to green logistics each attacking the issue from a different area and they include; “A top-down approach where environmental standards are imposed on the logistic industry by government policies through regulations; A bottom-up approach where environmental improvements are coming from the industry itself through the adoption of best practices through innovative firms; A compromise between the government and industry, notably through certification schemes leading to accreditation to desirable environmental standards.” Most of the time green logistics have been seen through a top down approach with the government setting emission regulations but in recent years we have been seeing more of a compromise between industry and government as companies move towards a bottom-up approach. The last step in all of the green logistics is to apply it to all of your supply chain, not just the transportation side of things. Making sure all of your warehousing operations are green isn’t really that hard and can be as easy as switching to solar power for your operation centers.