Sustainable go-green logistics solutions for Istanbul metropolis

Nowadays CO2 emissions have exponentially increased over the last decade due to cities development and population growth. Logistics has a major impact, mainly negative, on the environment degradation. In this paper we focus on innovative “green” logistics solutions, which can be applied at the big city level, in economic and population expansion (emerging metropolis). That scope is to reduce simultaneously pollution and traffic congestion in agglomerated area. As an example we use a DHL Business Plan for Istanbul, aiming to implement a non- or little-polluting transport mode (by land and by sea) and estimative cost calculation that will be incurred by this challenging task. The final result of the research reveals that, although we expect to have higher cost for such a non polluting challenge, on the long run, the benefits of a durable go-green policy has higher impact in terms of money savings, environment protection and next generation life standards. As the output is positive, these results can be successfully applied to other cities or large very populated area, but analysis is needed to figure out which combination of schemes fitted for a particular location.