This article inaugurates a series of publications on recovery logistics and green logistics, in which individual aspects of the issues discussed below will be discussed in detail.
During discussions between partners within the supply chain, topics related to product returns, or the return of returnable packaging or packaging for recycling within a given chain, are often raised. These discussions are treated marginally, without awareness of the actual significance of the costs of these operations within all logistics costs incurred by companies. In practice, their importance is not so negligible, and the time and financial resources that companies devote to solving problems related to these issues are significant.
Let us start by defining the research areas that concern the issues discussed. In the subject literature, we encounter two concepts: reverse logistics, often incorrectly translated as return logistics, reverse logistics, disposal logistics, recirculation logistics, or simply a return zone, and green logistics, translated as ecological logistics. The translation proposed for the concept of reverse logistics is recovery logistics. The justification for such an approach should be sought in the double meaning of the word recovery: colloquial, where recovery is “recovering something from what has already been used,” and statutory, where recovery is defined as “any operation, not posing a threat to human life, health or the environment, consisting in the use of waste in whole or in part, or leading to the recovery of substances, materials or energy from waste and their use.” Both the terms return logistics and return zone do not take into account the fact that this action aims to “recover” the value inherent in a given product or packaging, including the value in the form of customer satisfaction. Reverse logistics suggests, in accordance with the definition of the word reverse, i.e., “one that has characteristics opposite to something, has an opposite goal, an opposite result,” that it is an action contrary to the intended goal, and thus has a pejorative connotation. Disposal logistics suggests that the recovered products and/or packaging will be destroyed, in accordance with the meaning of the word disposal and the operating principles of disposal plants. Recirculation logistics suggests that a certain product or packaging circulates multiple times within a closed loop of the supply chain. This phenomenon could lead, for example, to downcycling, i.e., a significant deterioration in the quality of the final product as a result of a decrease in the quality of the secondary raw material. The decline in quality associated with mixing secondary raw materials, used for the first time, with those used multiple times, lowers the quality of the final product and can ultimately become dangerous to human life and health. On the other hand, reverse logistics (recovery logistics) is “the process of planning, implementing, and controlling the effective and economically efficient flow of raw materials, semi-finished products, and finished products along with information related to these flows from the point of consumption to the points of origin in order to recover value or ensure proper disposal,” which ultimately constitutes an argument in favor of the proposed form of using the Polish translation of this term. Green logistics, rightly called ecological logistics, is “the implementation of optimal solutions in the field of collection, storage, removal, and directing to disposal or environmentally and socially non-burdensome elimination of various types of waste,” including packaging waste. Green logistics deals primarily with mitigating the negative impact of logistics on the natural environment. These can be actions related to designing packaging in a way that ensures the minimization of raw materials necessary for their production, reusing packaging, reducing energy and pollution associated with transport, and recycling packaging waste. It is the responsibility of recovery logistics to handle the return of goods related to damage, product seasonality, resale, various types of returns from customers, and the elimination of warehouse surpluses. Pictorially, the relationships between both research areas can be described as shown in Fig. 1.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 1/2006.