Survey of Sustainable Logistics Servicesvia Text Mining

Environmental sustainability has recently become more and more of a concern in logistics service industry. Although studies on sustainable initiatives among logistics service providers (LSP) have been increasing in the extant literature, still little investigation has been performed between LSPs and shippers. The present paper aims to demonstrate award-gained sustainable logistics service initiatives implemented during the period 2006-2017 in Japan. Different with questionnaire-and interview-based studies employed in literature, we use text mining technique to explore the co-occurring links of data, i.e. connections of the practices, to present the collaborative sustainability actions carried out through providing and requiring logistics services. In contrast to the research regarding green supply chain management focused on manufacturing perspective, this study is positioned in the dual sides of consignors and logistics business operators, to depict their combined effort in achieving sustainability goals. The results of the study showed that text mining technique is useful for summarizing and presenting data in this research area. However, much remains to be learned about how to deal with the data more means-end logically for revealing more indirect associations between the data.