Sharing Resources for Greener Logistics

Abstract: Freight transportation, a significant contributor to the environmental impact of logistics, is projected to grow, thereby increasing its environmental footprint. With many actors contributing to the greening of logistics, their roles, and responsibilities for the greening of logistics differs. One mean for progressing the greening of logistics, is to share resources between actors needed for implementing different green logistics practices. Resource sharing among these actors will be a key strategy for advancing the greening of logistics.The purpose of this thesis is to increase the understanding how resources can be shared between actors to facilitate the implementation of green logistics practices. It focuses on the different green logistics practices that can be implemented to green logistics through a resource perspective, where resources and actors that controls resources and implements green logistics practices are the subject of analysis. Through the application of resource dependency theory, this thesis sets out to understand why actors need to share resources with other actors, and how they can manage their dependency onto resources controlled by other actors.The findings of suggest that there are different resources needed for green logistics: knowledge, technical resources, financial resources, time, employees, and IT-systems. The actors that control these resources or that implements green logistics practices are: logistics service providers, shippers, customers, technology providers, and governmental authorities. Through the lens of resource dependence, it is suggested how the dependencies can be managed through resources sharing between different actors. These ways of sharing resources are characterized by three parameters: duration (short-term vs long-term), directness (direct vs indirect), and scope (resource sharing with one or multiple actors). Through a combination of these parameters, different ways of sharing resources between actors are proposed.The contributions of this thesis are primarily aimed at enriching the green logistics literature and enlightening logistics practitioners. Theoretically, it extends our understanding of interaction for greener logistics by focusing on resource sharing between different actors. By applying resource dependency theory, a deeper understanding of why and how actors can share resources to enable the greening of logistics is given. Additionally, this thesis proposes a categorizations of green logistics practices, actors, and resource. This can be used to further understand green logistics, whilst simultaneously be a tool for practitioners to understand their role in the greening of logistics.