Warehousing sustainability standards development

Abstract

Warehousing, traditionally, is concerned only with the storage and distribution of products or work-in-process (WIP). However, the role of warehouses has evolved to also provide manufacturing, assembly, and other valueadded services. In that sense, warehouses and their operations play an important role in sustainable supply chain. However, sustainability improvement in warehousing has not been receiving much attention. This paper describes the motivations to develop sustainability standards for warehousing and introduces an effort recently started by industry to develop these standards. The paper is a starting point to define uniform sustainability metrics, measurements, and guidelines for the warehouse industry. It discusses future development directions and existing works that can form the basis for expanding the warehousing sustainability standards. Although there are no specific metrics and guidelines for warehousing operations in the existing works, we discuss they may be the basis for further development of such warehousing sustainability standards.