The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from freight transport by pooling supply chains

It is well known that freight consolidation is an effective way to improve the utilization of logistics resources. In fact today, this policy is locally and fragmentally implemented at the operational level. We propose here to explore the environmental impact of pooling of supply chains at the strategic level (merging supply chains). With real data from two main French retail chains and through an optimization model, we compute CO2 emissions for two transport modes, road and rail. As regards the general dependency of the emissions produced by the modes of transport on their loads, the emissions functions of the two modes are both piecewise linear and discontinuous functions. The supply network pooling proposed here is an efficient approach in reducing CO2 emissions. Even if the attention is focused on the emissions, the transportation costs are also studied and analyzed. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.