Abstract:

Operations in logistics and supplychain are becoming the part of today’s most important economic activities. Logisticsactivities, however, impose huge negative impact on nature environment, andbecome the significant sources of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions,which raised concerns on reducing the amount of emissions worldwide. Themotivation and goal of this paper is to study a “green” logistics and supplychain configuration design problem and further integrate with the decision onenvironmental investment. The research methodology of this paper is involved withproblem definition, mathematical modeling, and optimization. The paper use ageneric facility location model to design the green logistics network, whichfocuses on not only minimizing the cost of logistics system, but alsominimizing the emission of CO₂. The paper further discussesdifferences between “green” and traditional logistics settings, and finds theoptimal solution of logistics configuration in the context of the green supplychain.

Key word: Green Logistics, Configuration,Facility Location Model

I  Introduce                                                 

With theever-increasing environmental concerns over the past decade, in the field ofbusiness and management, there is growing recognition that issues of emissionof CO₂accompanying industrial development should be addressed simultaneouslyin the operational process of supply chain management, thus contributing to theinitiative of green-supply chain management (G-SCM). GSCM can be defined as integratingenvironment thinking into supply chain management, including product design, materialsourcing and selection, manufacturing processes, delivery of the final productto the consumers, and end-of-life management (Srivastara, 2007). Logistics andsupply chain have to balance efforts to reduce costs and innovate whilemaintaining good environmental (ecological) performance (Pagell et al., 2004).Green supply chain management (GSCM) has emerged as an approach to balancethese competitive requirements (Narasimhan and Carter, 1998). Traditionallyreducing cost, improving efficiency is regarded as the crucial drivers forcompetition, now green and sustainability can be a competitive advantage. Thewhole idea of a sustainable supply chain is to reduce costs while helping theenvironment.