Circular economy strategies for life cycle management of returnable transport items

Abstract

Global trading activities rely heavily on several billions of transport packaging and returnable transport items, including pallets, containers, and crates, facilitating efficient product handling, transportation, and storage processes. Despite their benefits, their increased adoption across global logistics activities contribute to both environmental inefficiencies and increased packaging waste globally, creating the need for embedding circular economy principles into their lifecycle management processes. This paper, therefore, presents a systems thinking-driven integrative literature review to identify circular economy strategies for lifecycle management of returnable transport items. A circular economy lifecycle strategy mapping tool is initially developed for strategy mapping across the different intersections between the circular economy taxonomy of regenerate, narrow, slow, and close, and the beginning, middle, and end of life stages of returnable transport items. Following the structure of the tool, a strategic framework is proposed, consisting of distinct circular economy strategies throughout these different intersections, alongside a detailed analysis of the benefits, connections and trade-offs, and their impact on the system's environmental performance. The proposed framework offers guidance to returnable transport item poolers and logistics service providers towards embedding circular economy principles in their business models and improving the environmental sustainability of their fleet.