Sustainable development of packaging logistics is both complicated and complex.
Sustainability, logistics, and packaging systems are constituted of various subsystems and variables. For example, environmental part of sustainability can include land, atmosphere, air, water, and natural resources. Logistics system has also gigantic subsystems such as massive processes, inventories, resources (like machines, vehicles, unit load carriers), flow of information, flow of money, and so on and so forth. Packaging system also includes enormous number of customized products, primary, secondary and tertiary packages. These are all indicators of complication of sustaining packaging logistics.
Sustainability of packaging logistics (let’s call it here SPL) is also complex! One aspect of such complexity is nonlinear emergent interactions between packages and their environments in their logistic life. For example a tiny change in packaging logistics system can have tremendous effects on its environment and vice versa. Another problem in this case is that such effects can be in several and diverse ways.
Difficulties in demarcation of SPL reveal complex attributes, too. Can we depict, in reality, boundaries and borders for our dynamic and adaptive logistics or packaging systems? Can we define where the environment begins and ends? Such difficulties make control, management, and development of SPL fairly complex.
Another important source of complexity of SPL is existence of paradoxes. By paradoxes, I mean conflicting objectives which exist at the same time! For example, in transport of packages, it is optimal to increase utilization of our resources like pallets and vehicles. On the other hand, higher utilization means higher weight and as a result more fuel consumption and emissions! Isn’t it surprising? Another paradox can be seen in social and environmental sustainability. For example, building infrastructure may lead to social sustainability but at the same time encouraging more usage of cars and vehicles and as a result higher emissions and environmental non-sustainability!
Diversity of subsystems, interactions, paradoxes, and so on makes sustainable development of packaging logistics system fairly complex. Study and investigation of such development call for thorough systematic and holistic models which reflect adaptive, emergent, paradoxical, and evolutionary characteristics of the system. One part of my research is developing such model.
I am also eager to study and investigate role of tools and concepts of complexity theory (like agent-based-modeling, adaptation) on sustaining (at first environmentally) logistic life of packages.
So, the second part of my research aims to answer the following question:
How can we develop environmental sustainable packaging logistics in a complexity- theory perspective?
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