Logistics Service Providers’ Environmental Management

This thesis aims to give a holistic description of logistics service providers’ environmental management, which has been lacking in literature. The aim is also to analyse how the logistics service providers’ environmental management provides value to their business, and to discuss its role in their business. This research contributes to the literature on green logistics, which regard the environmental sustainability related to logistics systems but largely lacks the logistics service providers’ perspective. The results support logistics service providers, who meet increasing demands on environmental sustainability, by providing a basis for discussion of how to work towards increased environmental sustainability in their business. It can contribute to discussions, evaluations and understanding of the role of environmental management as value-creating and strategic for the company. In order to explore what logistics service providers’ environmental management actually is, case studies of three different types of logistics service providers are carried out, and the environmental management of these companies are described in separate appended reports. This research is of an explorative nature and the research design has been developed in parallel with conducting the research. The researcher’s personal background thinking behind the research questions and purpose is also presented in addition to describing the research process, as it has impacted the research process. The analysis is inspired by the resource-based view. A literature framework on corporate environmental management and the resource-based view has been formed to provide a background for performing the case studies and to help structure the descriptions and analyses. The logistics service providers’ environmental management is related to compliance, internal efficiency and competitiveness. The analysis results show that environmental management to a great extent seems to be only of implicit interest for competitiveness at present and more to concern future competitiveness. A large part of meeting customers’ environmental demands today involves logistics service providers proving to their customers that they have an environmental effort, more or less regardless of what it actually includes. In order to further explore the value of environmental management, to show it more explicitly, the logistics service providers’ ability to cope with change regarding increased environmental demands is analysed. In this analysis, elements of dynamic capabilities in the companies’ environmental management are identified and presented. This research has generated several ideas for future research, first and foremost relating to organizational development of environmental management among logistics service providers and the development of more environmentally sustainable logistics services