Sustainable distribution

Sustainable distribution refers to any means of transportation / hauling of goods between vendor and purchaser with lowest possible impact on the ecological and social environment, and includes the whole distribution process from storage, order processing and picking, packaging, improved vehicle loadings, delivery to the customer or purchaser and taking back packaging.

Sustainable distribution refers to the macroeconomic allocation of the objects which are to be distributed (goods, services, rights, fees and information) while integrating sustainability issues without compromising any of the conventional purposes that distribution has to fulfill. Commonly, distribution means all the processes that occur between producers, retailers and customers. The functions of distribution are physical transportation, storage and warehousing, packaging, labeling, and reverse logistics.

In order for distribution processes to be considered sustainable, characteristics of sustainable products and services have to be derived and applied:

Transportation refers to the movement of products from one location to another. The fuel required to transport products depends on:

Most transportation infrastructure is owned and managed as a Public good throughout the world. This ensures optimal allocation of investments for maintenance and build-up of transport capacities as needed. Transportation policy aims to prevent abuse of monopoly power, promote fair competition, and balance environmental, energy, and social concerns in transportation.

By means of optimizing a country’s transport infrastructure, the distance that products travel can be reduced by creating more localized supply chains and by shifting from roads to rail or from air to sea. Transportation innovations can also contribute to the sustainability of distribution processes by improving fuel-efficiency of engines, optimizing vehicle loads and implementing intelligent transportation management systems.

Direct transportation is more efficient when large quantities are to be moved, whereas transportation through regional distribution centers is most efficient in case of small amount of products. Sustainable transportation lowers costs because companies end up reducing the inputs they use. In addition, the process generates additional revenues when it enables companies to create new businesses.

Unlike physical transportation of products over long distances, electronic distribution offers a substitutive way to deliver particular product groups and services to the end-consumer. This can only be applied to physical products that can be turned into intangible products by making them available for download instead of delivering them on media like DVD or CD. Examples would be movies, music or software. Another dimension to reduce environmental impacts of distribution processes lies in the replacement of centralized printing by electronical distribution of master-files to local print-houses. This holds true for newspapers, books, document management systems and mass-advertisements.

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Wikipedia