Supporting the Selection of Sustainable Logistics Locations

Selecting a logistics location is vital for logistics providers, food retailing and other trading companies since the selection poses an essential factor for economic success. Decisions on logistics locations currently mainly take into account economic factors. Environmental aspects play only a subordinate role, which impedes transparent and sustainable decisions. The result is an impeded dialog between the involved stake-holders within the location decision process, which leads to a dismissive position of municipalities and landowners. Besides logistics location may negatively affect eco systems in terms of sealing the surface, wrecking of biodiversity, or CO2 and noise emissions generated by traffic. The increasing importance of sustainability demands for informed decisions when selecting a future logistics location. Sustainability considers environmental aspects, which should be equally integrated in the process of logistics location search. This paper presents an innovative approach for supporting logistics companies when selecting new logistics locations. Basis for the innovative approach are the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Strategic Environmental Assessment tool (SEA). The presented approach extends the AHP method with content and methods out of the SEA tool for considering more environmental aspects in the logistics location selection process. The paper presents the essential steps for developing the innovative approach considering more environmental aspects which leads to more transparent and objective location decisions.