IN Brief:
- De Montfort University Leicester has launched a dashboard for East Midlands manufacturers to benchmark green logistics performance.
- The tool covers transport, packaging, purchasing, inventory management, and reverse logistics.
- Research involving 103 manufacturers identified reverse logistics as the largest improvement opportunity.
De Montfort University Leicester has launched an interactive green logistics dashboard to help East Midlands manufacturers benchmark environmental performance across transport, packaging, purchasing, inventory management, and reverse logistics.
The dashboard was developed by researchers at DMU and introduced at a regional event bringing together manufacturers, policymakers, and business support organisations. It accompanies one of the first regional assessments of green logistics practice across East Midlands manufacturing, drawing on research with 103 manufacturers of different sizes.
Packaging and environmental management emerged as the strongest areas in the assessment, while reverse logistics showed the largest gap for improvement. Medium-sized businesses performed significantly better than smaller companies, and organisations with formal environmental policies showed stronger green logistics performance.
The East Midlands gives the work a practical industrial setting. The region combines manufacturing, warehousing, road freight, rail links, airport logistics, and national distribution activity, making it a useful test bed for how businesses translate sustainability targets into logistics operations.
The dashboard breaks environmental performance into functions that can be assessed rather than leaving sustainability as a broad corporate commitment. Transport efficiency, packaging choices, procurement practice, stock management, and reverse flows all influence emissions, waste, cost, and resilience, but many manufacturers still measure them unevenly.
Reverse logistics is becoming particularly important as companies face greater pressure to recover materials, reduce waste, support repair and reuse models, and prepare for circular economy requirements. The recovery of goods, parts, packaging, and materials is often less mature than outbound logistics, partly because it is harder to forecast and harder to integrate into existing stock and procurement systems.
The same operational reading of sustainability appears in racking repair and warehouse asset-life decisions, where environmental performance is shaped by maintenance, reuse, and safety practice rather than corporate reporting alone. DMU’s dashboard applies that logic across a wider set of logistics functions.
Smaller manufacturers are likely to face the steepest challenge. Many lack dedicated sustainability teams, advanced data systems, or capital for major network redesign, yet they are increasingly expected to provide evidence to customers and regulators. Benchmarking can help identify practical first moves, including packaging changes, supplier consolidation, improved load planning, returnable transport items, and more structured reverse logistics partnerships.
Larger manufacturers may use the tool differently, particularly where customer requirements and disclosure rules are creating demand for stronger logistics data. Measuring the baseline is the first step towards improving it, but the real value will come when benchmarking informs route redesign, procurement decisions, supplier engagement, inventory policy, and investment in return flows.
DMU’s project turns green logistics into a set of measurable operating behaviours. That gives East Midlands manufacturers a clearer starting point than broad emissions ambition, while exposing the areas where day-to-day logistics practice still lags behind the sustainability language surrounding it.
