Mehrwegbehälter in der KEP-Branche: Evaluierung der ökologischen Auswirkungen bei der Einführung einer Mehrwegbehälter-Technologie

Abstract

The CEP industry (courier, express, parcel) is currently facing particular challenges - increasing ecommerce, green transformation and upcoming legislative requirements, particularly in Europe. Among other things, this presents the CEP industry with the challenge of gradually replacing the disposable packaging currently used with alternative packaging materials. One such alternative could be the implementation of reusable container technologies. In the first part of this thesis, the current status (from 2022 to April 2024) of reusable container technology in the CEP sector was analysed using a systematic literature review (SLR). This revealed that the use of reusable containers in the CEP sector is currently still limited. There are company-owned or industry-owned innovations, but no cross-industry pooling systems yet, such as Euro pallets. Nevertheless, reusable container technologies in combination with enabler technologies (tracking, etc.) are seen as having a promising future in the green transformation of the CEP industry, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic and the possible future legislative requirements (PPWR). In the second part of this thesis, the introduction of a reusable container from BOOXit was analysed in terms of its CO2 emissions as part of use cases (pharmaceutical logistics sector). The use cases and calculations were carried out as part of the ReKEP research project and associated project partners in order to demonstrate the ecological effects as part of a life cycle assessment in accordance with DIN EN ISO 14040/14044. It was established that BOOXit reusable containers can offer considerable potential savings in terms of CO2-eq in direct comparison with cardboard packaging. However, these savings potentials and ecological effects depend heavily on the utilisation conditions with regard to shrinkage and returns. These usage conditions were modelled as two additional use cases, which are intended to represent the aspect of loss (5% loss rate with digitalisation of the BOOXit box and 10% loss rate without digitalisation of the BOOXit box) and the suboptimal return (approx. 85km more than pharmaceutical logistics use case) even more realistically. It was recognised that the BOOXit box with 5% loss rate only emits less CO2-eq from the 696x cycle onwards than the same use case if this were to be achieved with cardboard (single use). On the basis of these life cycle assessments and the results, potential improvements were subsequently derived. These included, among other things, a reduction in cardboard consumption through the use of fit-optimised and volume-optimised cardboard packaging, a reduction in the amount of bubble wrap used, the use of sustainable substitutes for transport security and a general evaluation of whether transport security is even necessary for every shipment.

Date of Award	2024
Original language	German (Austria)
Supervisor	Sarah Pfoser (Supervisor)