A Roadmap for Improving Warehouse Environmental Sustainability: The Case of a Conditioned Logistics Facility for Medical Devices

In the logistics arena, green warehousing has been achieving increasing attention from both practitioners and academia. On the one hand, practitioners have started to search for solutions to decrease the environmental impact of their logistics facilities and incorporate practices towards greener warehousing processes. On the academic side, a rising – though limited – number of papers have been found addressing the impact of the green warehousing practices in place, together with the related effects on warehouse consumption and environmental performance. In this context, conditioned warehouses represent a key challenge due to their temperature constraints and the ever-demanding logistics performances, and related studies are still lacking. This paper aims to addressing this research gap by proposing a simulation-based approach where multiple scenarios of a real conditioned logistics facility are discussed, grounded on a conceptual framework of green warehousing practices selection process. Three different scenarios are proposed, and the related performances are examined in terms of energy consumption and CO2eq emissions. Implications of the results are discussed and streams for future investigation are identified.