Sustainable Supply Chain Management in Urban Logistics - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 32

If the environmental performance is a success (as shown below), it is also the
case of the financial and economic balance of the urban distribution solution.
3.2 Environmental Dimension
City logistics solutions like Cityporto are essentially developed for environmental
reasons. Moreover, the environmental performance of Cityporto's services have to
met several targets, because its connection to legislation and to public entities'
environmental actions. For these reasons, a study has been commanded to the
Bocconi University of Milan, Italy, to evaluate Cityporto's environmental perfor-
mance (Vaghi and Pastanella 2006 ). In that study it is estimated that the environ-
mental and social gains would have a monetary value of about 174.600 €/year. In
terms of environmental weights, the most benefic elements concern a reduction on
(1) the subtle powders [PM10], (2) the acoustic pollution and (3) the road incidents.
This calculation highlights the viability of the project and justifies the investments
made by the public entities in the first years. After this survey, environmental
indicators are calculated yearly on the basis of the methodology proposed by Vaghi
and Pastanella ( 2006 ). They are presented as the absolute gains (in tones) respect to
the situation in 2003. These results are difficult to understand without a global
vision of the emissions in the urban areas. For these reasons, we propose another set
of environmental indicators expressed as the percentage gains of pollution emis-
sions respect to those measured before the pilot tests (2003) (Table 1 ).
Another important aspect is the internal waste management procedures. In a
system like Cityporto, the waste is basically empty boxes and packages, most of
them recyclable. A specific container in the platform is filled in by Cityporto's
operators. Its position in the platform has been chosen by practical rules to
improve the time performance of the operations. This container is emptied in the
corresponding place for recycling for all the industrial area where the platform is
located. The reverse logistics procedures are not very important because the only
materials that can follow them are the empty pallets. However, the management of
returned freight that has not been able to reach its destination for several reasons is
an important question that is daily answered. A special area of the platform is
reserved to undelivered commands and the customer is informed immediately, in
order to quickly find a solution to deliver it to the retailer or to return it to the
customer.
3.3 Social Dimension
The number of employees in charge of Cityporto is small (only three) makes the
system a family structure. For Cityporto's operational planning and management,
a co-operative enterprise is contracted. These people are administratively external