Economic and environmental sustainability of a large-scale retail store

This study investigates the issue of sustainability evaluation in a large-scale retail store (RS), which carries out four main different processes, i.e. Receiving, Backroom storage, Sales area management and Reverse logistics. A computational model is developed under Microsoft Excel™ to assess the costs and the CO2 emissions of the RS. The application of the model is presented for a reference process (i.e. the Receiving process), while for the remaining processes, we present and discuss only the main results obtained. We found that the highest environmental impact and total cost are due to the Sales area management process, while Reverse logistics contributes to the total cost to a limited extent. The results obtained can provide useful guidelines for RS managers when pondering the optimization of sustainability.