Study on Green Logistics Initiatives through Text Mining

Abstract

Different with the traditional, green logistics unifies sustainable economic and social development. In addition, due to the nature of cross-functional logistics activities, it brings more difficulty to green development in the logistics market. In this paper, 52 award-gained green logistics initiatives/practices implemented during the period of 2006-2017 in Japan are studied. For doing so, text mining technique is used to explore the co-occurring links within words and to present the collaborative green initiatives. In contrast to most research on sustainable logistics directed towards manufacturing companies in the product-focused supply chain management, this study is positioned in the dual perspective of logistics service providers and shippers to demonstrate their combined effort of achieving sustainability goals. The results of the analysis showed that text mining technique is useful for summarizing and presenting the data in this research area, however, how to deal with the data more means-end logically remains in the future for revealing more indirect associations between the words.