Assessing the impacts of road freight transport on sustainability: A case study in the sugar-energy sector

With globalization, logistics has assumed a key role in the planning, organizing and controlling of movement of products around the world. This has caused significant impacts on sustainability, especially with operations involving road freight transport. In order to measure the real impacts of this activity and make decisions aligned with sustainability, logistics planners must use methods that consider the economic, environmental and social dimensions. Existing methods for assessing the impacts do not consider these dimensions together, which precludes a complete view of the effects of road freight transport on sustainability. The objective of this paper is to propose a method for assessing the impacts of road freight transport on all three dimensions of sustainability. For this purpose, the main quantitative indicators were identified, a scale was established to classify the impact intensity and the form of the results presentation was defined. Finally, a case study was carried out in a large Brazilian sugar-energy company to verify the method's applicability. The results showed that the evaluated truck fleets had significant impacts on all dimensions. The proposed method allows companies to have an overall vision of the impacts on sustainability, enabling the identification of impacts with higher intensity and consequently contributing to decision-making processes to mitigate them. This paper also advances sustainable logistics theory by encouraging the development of new research involving logistics and the three dimensions of sustainability. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.