Environmental Impact Assessment of road transportation : Analysis to measure environmental impacts of road transportation basedon a company case

Activities, conducted in the logistics sector, contribute to pollute the world. Especially, road transportation contaminates the environment with the release of exhaust emissions. Transport volumes as well as the proportion of the road sector are constantly rising, which intensifies its environmental impacts. In order to determine the main culprits of pollution, Environmental Impact Analysis (EIA) are used. These concepts are mostly ambiguous, fuzzy and hard to present in a comprehensive way. The main purpose of the present thesis is to develop an analysis in order to investigate the environmental impacts of road transportation along a certain supply chain. An academic resource was used as database, in order to develop and test an exhauste mission calculation in cooperation with a case company. Besides CO2, this assessment also focuses on the measurement of other exhauste missions like Nox, PM or CO. Furthermore, economic factors like, costs caused per transport are calculated. Aspects, like capacity utilization, the use of environmentally friendly tires or eco-friendly driving styles, are included in the analysis. These factors influence fuel consumption and thus the final production of exhaust emissions. A detailed description of each factor and calculation step is illustrated in this thesis. Due to a high complexity of transportation, this analysis is limited to road transportation. The fundament of the analysis builds the categorization of crafts due to the Euro standards. Hence, just transports conducted with crafts, manufactured within the European Union, can be evaluated. A validation test and in-depth interviews were conducted in order to approve the practicability of the developed assessment. During this process, strengths and weaknesses of the analysis were identified. Finally, the analysis is critically examined by showing its application constraints as well as prospective development opportunities. An enlargement, to include other transport modes, material handling activities in order to measure impacts during intermodal transportation along a whole transportation chain, is a prospect outlook