Environmental Impact of E-Commerce Logistics : When is Home Delivery More Efficient than Collection-Delivery Points?

Sammanfattning: In the literature on B2C logistics of e-commerce, the two main delivery methods - home delivery and delivery to collection-delivery points (CDPs) - have rarely been compared with respect to their environmental effects. This is the case despite a growing e-commerce and the fact that the logistic part of the transportation sector stands for a great amount of the pollution in urban areas. In this report, the two delivery methods have been compared to each other with respect to their environmental impacts through a custom-made network impact model, including simulation using vehicle routing problems (VRPs) and a cross-nested logit model. The results show that one delivery method's advantage over the other (only regarding emissions) is strongly dependent on the distance to the distribution center (DC), the customer density, the density of CDPs and the demographics of that area. Home deliveries proved to be more sensitive to the customer density factor and the distance to the DC than CDP deliveries.