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1. Introduction
As previously highlighted by Perotti et al. (2012), the topic of environmental sustainability has brought about rising interest from both the practitioner and the research community perspective, especially over the past decade (e.g. Hendrickson et al., 2006; Mahler, 2007; Seuring and Müller, 2008; Gimenez Thomsen et al., 2012). On the one hand, such growing importance has been mainly due to increased environmental concerns, such as environmental pollution accompanying industrial development (Sheu et al., 2005), diminishing raw material resources, overflowing waste sites and increasing levels of pollution (Srivastava, 2007). Besides, other key factors such as government regulations, changing consumer demands, and the development of international certification standards (Melynk et al., 1999; Murphy and Poist, 2003) have progressively led companies to look at sustainability initiatives with increasing attention.
Many contributions on this topic can be found in the extant literature, sometimes under the label “Green Supply Chain Management” (GSCM) (e.g. Murphy and Poist, 2000; Faruk et al., 2001; Zhu et al., 2008a). However, although previous studies have made significant contributions to the literature, much still remains to be learnt about managing environmental issues in logistics (e.g. McKinnon, 2010; Venus, 2011). Moreover, papers approaching the issue of environmental sustainability from the perspective of third-party logistics (3PLs) are still few (e.g. Facanha and Horvath, 2005; Wolf and Seuring, 2010; Lieb and Lieb, 2010). It is nonetheless interesting to note that research on these topics has progressively increased, thereby exposing the need to call attention to environmental sustainability within companies that either carry out logistics and transportation activities in-house or outsource them to third-parties (e.g. Marasco, 2008). As such, an initial attempt to summarise and create a review on the subject may prove particularly beneficial.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is little literature review that specifically examines environmental sustainability by adopting the viewpoint of companies performing logistics and transportation activities. From a broader (i.e. supply chain) perspective, we found a review of sustainable supply chain management by Seuring and Müller (2008). We also detected a state-of-the-art literature review on GSCM by Srivastava (2007) developed according to a holistic perspective, and not focusing on a specific theme such as logistics. On a more limited scope, we found a review by...