Environmental impacts as buying criteria for third party logistical services

The purpose of the paper is to analyse whether environmental issues form a supplier selection criteria of companies when sourcing third party logistics (3PL) services.

The paper is based on a total of nine cases, where six buyers and three 3PL are analysed in depth so that data are collected for both parties involved in related dyadic relationships.

While 3PL reports an increasing interest in environmental issues, buying decisions are still made on “traditional” performance objectives, such as price, quality and timely delivery. Environmental concerns have not been incorporated and at best form a kind of minimum requirement. Related cooperation, as asked for when taking a wider supply chain management perspective, could not be identified.

The paper has the limitation that only a total of nine companies are analysed. Yet, these companies can be seen as being good representatives of the overall industry. Further, detailed information is collected on all companies, it permitted the understanding of related corporate action. One implication would be conducting, e.g. a survey for collecting data on a larger number of cases.

Buyers of 3PL services and companies are challenged towards rethinking their strategies.

So far, there is very little research on how buyers and 3PL jointly manage environmental issues. The paper addresses environmental issues as a buying criteria and places this into the wider literature on logistics and sustainable supply chain management.