Life Cycle Assessment of last-mile distribution system on a territory – Paris region case study
Abstract
For retailers and consumers, the calculation of environmental impacts related to their supply activity or consumption is now a challenge to either optimize organization or change shopping habits. However, retail activities are now very diverse based on the nature of products sold, on their commercial surface and their associated distribution logistics. Indeed, in addition to e-commerce retail, “brick-and-mortar” shops rely on various last-mile distribution systems, which allow the delivery and purchase of goods from regional distribution center or warehouse to the consumer place.
After presenting main literature on environmental assessment of distribution logistics, this presentation aims to develop a modeling framework to estimate environmental impacts of different last-mile distribution systems on a territory. Six distribution systems are modeled and compared. Five are “traditional” retail sectors: hypermarkets, supermarkets, small generalist retail, small food retail and small non-food retail. For all five, we model warehouse activity, shop delivery, shop in use, consumer mobility and delivery packaging. For e-commerce home deliveries, only warehouse, home delivery and packaging are modeled.
The modeling framework is broken down into seven steps: 1/ estimate the quantity of goods purchased by households, 2/ distribute purchases among commercial establishments, 3/ generate B2B deliveries, 4/ generate parcel deliveries for e-commerce, 5/ calculate distances and loads of deliveries, 6/ compute exhaust emissions and fuel consumption of trucks, and 7/ estimate environmental burdens of consumers’ mobility, warehouses, shops and packaging. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach is conducted on each component of the last-mile distribution systems, included in our study boundary. Specific LCA inventories are added to cover our system. Furthermore, delivery and impact assessment models are ran for every store of the studied territories, enriching analysis with spatial analysis and contribution analysis.
To illustrate our modeling and environmental assessment framework, we apply it on one of the most dynamic European regions in the retail sector, the Paris region. We value and distribute around 10 million tons per year of products among 57,000 stores and 12,3 million households. The distribution of these goods generates around 2.3 million tons of CO2-eq per year, mainly due to ‘traditional’ retails. Reported to products mass, we estimate an average carbon intensity of 0.23 kg of CO2-eq per kg of product. This carbon intensity is significantly heterogeneous on the territory, depending on the location, peripheric locations emitting more, on the type of store, with changing contribution. Through this study, various lessons can be drawn to reduce impacts and optimize distribution system from the warehouse to consumers.