My current research - part 1 - Sustainable Packaging Logistics

Please turn your head, for a while, around the table that you have sat! What do you see? Four chairs, three cutleries, a box of Swedish pepparkaka, a dish of prinskorv and sill, and a bunch of other things? That’s great! Now, imagine that all these objects were without any kind of package! In this case, could you maintain, preserve, protect, or handle them? Definitely not! This is the basic role of packages and packaging.
More interesting is when your surrounding objects and their packages move! Another role of packages and packaging is that they make transport, shipment, and distribution of products and objects, possible. Combination of all such roles of packages constitutes packaging system. In general, packaging system includes design and development of products, primary packages (those which are in direct contact with the product), secondary packages (which contain several primary ones), and tertiary packages (assembly of a number of primary and secondary packages on a pallet or roll container).

Do you know that packages have life? Please do not be surprised if I tell you that they are born, live, and die. They can be even reused and recycled after their life and be born again!!! Please do not be shocked if I tell you that they have even logistic life! In fact they are transported, stored and warehoused, sorted, purchased, and sold. Logistic life of packages calls for integration, control, and management of their communication and movements. It also necessitates thorough analysis of interactions between packaging system and logistics system. My colleagues and I at division of packaging logistics at Lund University investigate such interactions by analyzing effects of logistics system (like transportation, communication, warehousing, inventory methods, and movement of resources (like unit-load-carriers) and money) on packaging system (products design and development as well as primary, secondary, and tertiary packages) and vice versa.

My current research is about developing sustainability of logistic life of packages. By this, I mean developing effective and efficient logistic life for our packages in a way that does not compromise logistic life of future generations of our packages. It is usually discussed that such development asks for harmonizing environment, society and economy of our packages in their logistic life.
Worth mentioning, my research focus is mainly on developing environmental sustainability of logistic life of our products (goods) and their packages. Such development calls for sustainable environment for sustainable logistic life of our sustainable packages.
In regard to this, I am analyzing effects of logistics (like distribution, transport, storage, reuse, and recycle) of our products and their packages on their environments (consider their ambience and surroundings) and vice versa.
To make a long story short, this phase of my research deals with design and development of environmentally sustainable packaging logistics. Such sustainability is mostly explored in interactions between packaging system, logistics system, and environment.My first research question can be considered as follow:

How can we design and develop environmental sustainable packaging logistics?

My current research (Follow it in the two coming posts)!

Dear readers of this blog!
I hope you have started a prosperous 2010.

During the recent months, I received some questions about my current studies and reserach. At the moment, I do reserach on sustainable packaging logistics in a complex theoretical perspective. I do beleive that packaging logistics and its sustainable development are some of the best platforms for real world application of complexity thinking.

In the following posts,I am going to explain briefly some of the relationships between packaging system, logistics system, sustainable develeopment, and complexity thinking. In the two following posts, I discuss mostely about two parts of my research which are:
1) Sustsinable packaging logistics,and
2) Sustainable development of packaging logistics in a complexity paradigm.

So, please do not forget to pursue and read the two coming posts!