A review and research agenda for recent socially and environmentally sustainable practices for warehouse management systems

Abstract

Purpose

The concept of a sustainable warehouse management system (WMS) is a relevant yet under-researched area within warehousing logistics. The purpose of this research is twofold: first, to review the literature on the topic of socially and environmentally sustainable practices; second, to lay the theoretical base for identifying social and environmental sustainability practices in warehousing operations that can serve as focus areas for WMS operational functions.

Design/methodology/approach

This research built knowledge on a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis in Scopus Elsevier and Web of Science Core Collection databases. After comprehensively filtering English literature from 2016 to 2024, only 43 out of the initial 601 studies comprised relevant warehousing practices that can be incorporated into the scope of WMS activities.

Findings

As a result, retrieved practices were allocated to a specifically designed warehouse model within the main processes, equipment and resources. This model could serve as a baseline for incorporating 48 sustainable WMS practices. The prevailing share of practices focuses on environmental rather than social warehouse sustainability. WMS should adopt sustainable warehousing practices to reduce warehouses' carbon footprint, energy and resource consumption and improve working conditions in a warehouse.

Originality/value

There have not been any existing reviews on warehouses' social and environmental sustainability to synthesize knowledge and serve as a base for WMS sustainability. This research will contribute to developing more sustainable and environmentally responsible warehousing operations, ultimately benefiting society and the environment. By incorporating such practices into WMS, warehouse owners can ensure efforts toward social and environmental sustainability while still maintaining efficient operations.

Citation

Minashkina, D. (2024), "A review and research agenda for recent socially and environmentally sustainable practices for warehouse management systems", The International Journal of Logistics Management, Vol. 35 No. 7, pp. 60-98. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-07-2023-0265

1. Introduction

The world is now at a crossroads where real decisions should be made. Sustainability is no longer a buzzword but a necessity. The truth is undeniable: the destiny of our planet and humankind’s well-being hangs by a thread while planetary ecosystems continue to decline. Planetary health is deteriorating, driven by unsustainable consumption (Lim, 2022). Academics are one of the stakeholders in the sustainability pyramid who, by conducting extensive research, have the responsibility of discovering, spreading and disseminating knowledge to show and persuade policymakers and companies on how to achieve and integrate sustainability aspects (Lim, 2023). The way of generating higher performance to achieve sustainable economics in supply chain (SC) operations has been widely researched in literature, while the environmental and social have yet to be investigated (Gupta and Palsule-Desai, 2011; Pagell and Shevchenko, 2014; Rajeev et al., 2017). Turning a widely known paradigm of an SC being as strong as its weakest link (Benton and Maloni, 2005) toward sustainability – every chain (stop, intermediate and connection point) of SC should also be sustainable to ensure overall sustainability. With rising SC complexity, warehousing has become an increasingly important factor in companies' success or failure (Durakbasa and Gençyılmaz, 2022). A warehouse is an indispensable part of the SC, playing not only a vital strategic role in operational processes (receiving, storing, retrieving, handling work and shipping raw materials or final products) but also being an essential component of sustainable SC management.

The number of warehouses has grown globally in the last two decades (Mazareanu, 2021). The convenience and popularity of online shopping have led to the rapid and exponential growth of e-commerce (Kumar et al., 2021a), requiring more warehouses to store and distribute a wide range of products efficiently to meet continued customer demands. E-commerce created a demand for more warehouse space (Dembińska, 2016). This way, warehouse buildings have generally increased in size compared to the past. According to the CBRE Global Research and Consulting (2021), for example, in the USA, the average size of newly built warehouses from 2002 to 2018 increased by 168% (6,410 m² vs 17,187 m²), while in Europe, this change from 2008 to 2018 years comprises 46% (4,273 m² vs 6,225 m²). By consuming energy and resources, warehouses generate significant sustainability impacts (Freis et al., 2016). According to the US Department of Energy (2020), commercial and industrial buildings, including warehouses, were responsible for approximately 17% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States in 2018. Energy use in the building sector is expected to increase by 30% by 2040 (International Energy Agency, 2019). Ries et al. (2017) found that in the USA, warehouse-related emissions amounted to 380 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) per year. Based on statistics International Energy Agency (2019), in 2017, only 17% (24,500) of all warehouses around the globe (141,500) were located in North America. By calculating the proportion, the global CO₂ emission would be 2.2 billion tonnes of CO₂. To transform an abstract notion into a concrete, tangible equivalent, only one tonne of CO₂ is equivalent to a 4,000-kilometer-long trip by a gasoline-powered car. Driving such a car around the Earth one time will cause 10 tonnes of CO₂. To have the same amount of CO₂ generated, we can drive this car approximately 220 million times around the Earth. Moreover, warehouses caused more emissions than wildfires globally do (1.76 billion tonnes of carbon globally in 2021 (Abnett, 2021). The importance of addressing warehouse environmental sustainability cannot be overstated.

In addition to the environmental impact, it is also crucial to study the social sustainability of warehousing. Attention should be paid to warehouse workers' well-being and health, too. For example, based on statistics, there are approximately 85 forklift fatal cases and 34,900 serious injuries in warehouses per year in the USA (Paulausky, 2013). Taking the same country for comparing statistics, the number of 85 forklift fatalities is nearly three times more than the number of fatalities in mining facilities in the USA (37 fatal cases) (Statista Research, 2022). The number of deaths from forklift driving in the USA is 17 times more than the yearly number of fatal shark incidents worldwide (Naylor, 2022). According to the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, storage was among the work fields with the most negligible recorded reduction in fatalities between 2010 and 2020 (Eurostat, 2022). These statistics demonstrate the importance of ensuring workplace safety in warehousing operations. In addition, automation and technology can improve safety, reduce excess risks and save lives in warehousing operations (Ali and Phan, 2022).

To optimize rising inventory volumes, maximize warehouse resource utilization and significantly boost warehouse performance, a warehouse management system (WMS) is implemented (Shiau and Lee, 2010). WMS is an IT software solution designed to handle and optimize warehouse logistics activities and support warehousing process automation. WMS is crucial for providing highly effective services and optimizing and automating material and information flows (Hompel and Schmidt, 2007). Au (2009) recommends that companies involved in warehousing deploy WMS to remain competitive in global markets. A growing body of literature has investigated the benefits of implementing a WMS to increase productivity, reduce costs and improve overall customer satisfaction (Autry et al., 2005; Ramaa et al., 2012; Richards, 2017). Over the past decade, the debate about sustainable warehousing has gained new prominence and research spins (Ibrahim et al., 2022; Malinowska, 2022). Even though the concept of sustainability in warehousing has shown signs of increasing academic attention, the actual role of WMS as a tool to bring sustainability to warehouse activities still needs to be a well-studied field (Torabizadeh et al., 2020; Minashkina and Happonen, 2023). Torabizadeh et al. (2020) identified and weighed sustainable key performance indicators (KPIs) for WMS but did not discuss specific areas of improvement in WMS operations. Minashkina and Happonen (2023) collected WMS sustainability literature and faced a scarcity of journal articles to understand WMS sustainability practices comprehensively. To bridge this gap, the aim of this research is twofold: first, to review the recent literature on the topic of socially and environmentally sustainable practices; second, to lay the theoretical foundations for connecting such practices and WMS scope of operations in a warehouse. Thus, the author defines two research questions (RQs) to be answered at the end of this study.

RQ1.

What are recent social and environmental sustainability practices in warehousing operations?

RQ2.

How can WMS address these social and environmentally sustainable practices within the scope of warehousing?

This paper reviews the research conducted on environmental and social warehousing practices that WMS can adopt due to the gap in knowledge of the literature. This study does not address the aspects of economic sustainability and logistics costs assessment or analysis of implementing WMS as the financial benefits associated with the system are undeniable, such as optimized labor costs and reduction of warehouse equipment costs, e.g. forklift (Kučera, 2017), more accurate and time-efficient order-picking process with a minimized error rate (Anđelković and Radosavljević, 2018). The economic side is increasingly salient to achieve the triple bottom line (TBL) toward sustainable development (Glac, 2015). The current research seeks to discuss sustainable practices and operations inside warehouses and experienced by warehouse personnel, not outside warehouse activities, e.g. organizing transport nodes between several warehouses. Additionally, topics beyond the scope are construction materials and set standards for warehouse building sustainability (Ferreira et al., 2023). Due to practical constraints, this paper cannot comprehensively review WMS options offered in the global market.

The overall structure of the article takes the form of six parts, including the introduction (Figure 1). The paper starts by reviewing the evidence for the research scope of WMS functions and sustainability focus. Then, research methods and data collection processes are discussed. The following section concerns the descriptive and content analysis of the studies found. Finally, the conclusion gives a summary of research findings as well as managerial and theoretical implications, drawing future research directions on the topic of WMS sustainability.

2. WMS research background

2.1 Defining research focus area of WMS functions

To gain insights into the main research focus on the topic and emphasize the lack of sustainability focus on WMS literature, the preliminary search of the full term “warehouse management system” was performed using Scopus as one of the most well-known and enriched databases. The search in this database hit 702 results dated till February 2023. Author keywords are a valid source of information for mapping research fields and identifying emerging topics (Cobo et al., 2011). Appendix A comprises the research heating map generated with the VOS viewer software tool. This heating map shows the density and depth of the research, visualizing the co-occurrence of 1,198 authors' keywords. The most and the least researched topics can be seen, as the brighter color indicates the most widely discussed topics. Sustainability-related keywords account for less than 1% of the total keywords number. Only nine, a bit more than 1% of a total of 702 studies mention sustainability-related focus in their keywords a focus related to sustainability. There are hardly noticeable bursts of sustainability-related authors' keywords in the set of found WMS research that are described in the text below.

Looking deeply at keyword clusters and paper connections, it is worth noting that mainly all sustainability keyword-related studies except one look like isolated islands, not having any connections to other similar authors' keywords. For example, Klumpp and Loske's (2021) study raised the concept of sustainability resilience as the impact of IT disruptions in retail logistics. Mitrofanovs et al. (2019) developed an algorithm to optimize SC for reaching logistics operations efficiency, protecting the environment through resource conservation and reducing waste to minimize negative environmental impact. The study with a similar intention of protecting the environment belongs to Wang and Deng (2013), who discussed using existing subway infrastructure as a sustainable logistics system to reduce transportation costs and environmental impacts. Papazafeiropoulou et al. (2013) discussed implementing green IT logistics practices, such as route optimization and reverse logistics, to reduce carbon emissions and improve SC sustainability in Greek retailer logistics. Shaharudin and Fernando (2023) studied the social network of SC actors to improve the performance of cold SC of leafy green vegetables with advanced technologies to achieve the United Nations' sustainable development goal. Torabizadeh et al. (2020) define KPIs for a sustainable WMS by mapping indicators of warehouse management according to the TBL approach without explanation on how exactly WMS could contribute to reaching these sustainable KPIs. Tan et al. (2009) present a framework for sustainable warehouse management, balancing the economic, environmental and social warehouse operations. Bag et al. (2018) discuss the potential of Industry 4.0 technologies, such as big data analytics and the IoT, to improve SC and reduce environmental impact. The only one study having at least some network connection to some of the 701 studies authors' keywords belongs to Tong et al. (2023). These authors introduced the concept of the sustainable digital factory as an automated warehouse in which enterprise resource planning (ERP) and WMS are interfaced with other warehouse equipment. This is the only paper in which the keyword “automated warehouse” is used together in studies devoted to discussing warehouse automation solutions.

Based on the findings from the research heat map, it can be concluded that sustainability is a relatively cold topic in WMS research-related keywords given by authors. Nevertheless, there is a need for a study to shed light on how WMS could provide social and environmental sustainability to warehousing operations. The functions of WMS might bring sustainability, but more research is needed to determine how. As WMS is implemented in a warehouse and builds its primary operations around warehouse activities and processes, they should define WMS desired output and deliverables. To improve the sustainability of WMS, researchers should take a look at a warehouse. WMS is built to serve warehouse operations and warehouse needs, so warehousing is the starting point of WMS defining its scope of actions to be socially and environmentally sustainable.

2.2 Overview of WMS operational functions

WMS has expanded the scope of its functions from just system for accounting the stock-keeping units (SKUs after) toward smart WMS (Hompel and Schmidt, 2007; Khan et al., 2022). The primary objective of WMS is the management of a warehouse. The scope of functions of WMS lies in keeping inventory information, managing warehouse processes and resources, as well as reporting and executing warehouse operations (Faber et al., 2002). Generally, WMS performs a wide range of warehouse operations and tasks necessary for daily warehousing, and the role of WMS is to help manage the fulfillment of these warehouse tasks. The essential functions are receiving, put-away/storage, order-picking and shipping (Andiyappillai and Prakash, 2019). In the process of receiving SKUs, WMS assists in recording inbound inventory and quality inspection and assigning an optimal product allocation in a warehouse (Trab et al., 2015). Additionally, WMS has a partial or full cross-docking function, meaning that goods will leapfrog the storage process to enter the despatching order (Min, 2006). As WMS works with SKU records, the system also does inventory replenishment, adjustment and cycle counting to monitor inventory levels (Hill, 1997; Piasecki, 2004; Trebilcock, 2009). For order picking, WMS can plan and prepare a picking list with grouped inventory items and an optimized picking route (Anđelković and Radosavljević, 2018). Before shipping, WMS supports the packaging of goods and grouping items for shipment loading (Kappauf et al., 2012). WMS can also show equipment utilization work process statistics and generate activity reports (Hackman et al., 2001). WMS is equipped with a labor management module to manage a warehouse’s workload (Min, 2006). Also, WMS has adopted some functions from ERP, transport management system (TMS) and supply chain management (SCM) systems, for example, complete order fulfillment from receiving to dispatching process, routes and tours, billing and other value-added services (Nettsträter et al., 2015). Figure 2 illustrates the general scope of WMS activities performed in a warehouse.

3. Research design

3.1 Research methodology

The research data collection and analysis taken in the study are based on a combined methodology of systematic literature review (SLR) and bibliometric analysis (BA). Applying both methods, the author aims to cover and measure the research of environmental and social practices in a warehouse. First, the author extracted relevant research by conducting an SLR, then quantified the research performance with a BA and provided qualitative content analysis. To elaborate, SLR helps frame the research and gather relevant literature to conduct further BA and content analysis. Based on academic literature, the current research identifies social and environmental sustainability practices in warehousing operations that can serve as focus areas for WMS activities toward more sustainable warehousing.

For addressing the set goal, the choice of SLR over a traditional literature review was based on removing any possible biases caused by the author’s subjectivity and guaranteeing good baseline work for further research replication (Kraus et al., 2022). According to Kitchenham (2004), with the help of SLR, “all available research relevant to a particular research question, or topic area, or phenomenon of interest” can be identified, evaluated and interpreted. Moreover, SLR is also at the top of the hierarchy of research evidence (Glasziou and Vandenbroucke, 2004; Gopalakrishnan and Ganeshkumar, 2013; Siddaway, 2014). Providing a rigorous theoretical synthesis of already published literature on the topic, SLR can “lie at the heart of pragmatic management research” to advance academic and practitioner communities (Tranfield et al., 2003). An SLR was chosen over a non-systematic review (or a narrative review) to provide a structured, transparent and reproducible systematic review (García-Peñalvo, 2022). Tranfield et al. (2003) emphasize the importance of developing a review protocol in SLR to provide transparent and high-quality research process findings. The author selected to follow the Scientific Procedures and Rationales for Systematic Literature Reviews (referred to later as SPAR-4-SLR) protocol to review topic-related publications by Paul et al. (2021). This protocol is used to develop rigorous and transparent reporting in SLR, obtain insights and advance knowledge in the selected research domain.

The author adhered to the comprehensive BA de Oliveira et al. (2019) designed for mining and analyzing bibliometric data, mapping state-of-the-art and identifying research trends model of de Oliveira. According to Campbell et al. (2010), the bibliometric method is a tool used to measure the performance of scientific publications. As stated by Mukherjee et al. (2022) and by Lim and Kumar (2023), the author can capture and assess the characteristics of the multifaceted dynamic of research production (e.g. publications) and consumption (e.g. citations) with the BA.

Based on Paul et al. (2021) categorization of the SLR forms, the SLR in this research is a hybrid review combining bibliometric and conceptual domain-based review aiming at revealing research trends in socially and environmentally sustainable warehouse practices and proposing such practices for WMS.

Web of Science Core Collection and Elsevier’s Scopus were used as online electronic databases to extract academic literature for this study. Both of these databases are widely recognized and recommended as search systems (Gusenbauer and Haddaway, 2020). Aside from this, selected databases provide multidisciplinary and essential standard measures supporting the comparison of the academic results and their data extraction features to allow a proper BA (de Oliveira et al., 2019). The Web of Science database also has the most extended systematic history of citation indexes. In contrast, the Scopus index has the largest number of journals in all the different fields (Li et al., 2010). The last argument for using these databases is that both Web of Science and Scopus dominate academic research (Zhu and Liu, 2020).

Microsoft Excel was used to proceed with research data and build tables and figures, while VOSviewer was used to visualize co-citations and keywords' co-occurrence.

3.2 Publications collection

The current research adopted the three-stage SPAR-4-SLR protocol developed by Paul et al. (2021) to review topic-related publications, as illustrated in Figure 3.

Assembling as the first stage of this protocol comprises two sub-stages of identification and acquisition of publications for review. This research aims to identify socially and environmentally sustainable warehouse practices/activities that might be incorporated into WMS. The research domain is addressed with the defined research questions. For the source type of literature, the author selected peer-reviewed journal publications, conference proceedings and books.

The publications' bibliometric data is withdrawn from Scopus and Web of Science. Both databases are known for the quality of their published materials. This way, the author utilized these two search engine databases to acquire research studies and their bibliometrics.

The author referred and aligned to the prior research gathering and analyzing literature on sustainable warehousing to justify the search time frame for withdrawing publications from these databases. For example, Bartolini et al. (2019) conducting a SLR on the topic of green warehousing noted a significant increase in researchers’ attention between 2014 and 2018 years. A supporting finding belongs to Ma and Kim (2023) who analyzed the topic and evolution of green logistics (GL), including green warehousing studies. They identified the rapid growth of articles starting in 2015. Addressing social sustainability and SCM, Nakamba et al. (2017) discovered that the majority of publications were from 2015 onward. A study by Al Saad et al. (2023) encompasses the features of sustainable warehousing through the SLR for the last 10 years, which steadily started to be addressed from 2017 onward. Additionally, looking at the governmental front, in September 2015, the United Nations introduced 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that have shaped and steered business activities (Erin et al., 2022). Lazar et al. (2021) revealed the steady growth of logistics- and supply-chain-related research in terms of priority and secondary orientation to SDGs in 2016. In addition, from the Scope database search for the “sustainability” and “warehouse” terms, approximately 80% of related research was produced from 2016 to 2024 (Appendix B). Given the aforementioned details, the author selected 2016 as the starting time interval for collecting publications bringing up warehouse practices in environmental and social sustainability.

The formulated research questions define the discovery of the research domain and the choice of keywords. The keywords set used for searches in two databases is warehous* AND sustain* AND (social OR environmental). The preference was given for an asterisk (*) in warehous* search to encompass warehouse logistics operations and activities. Moreover, other synonyms of a warehouse, such as distribution and logistics centers, were searched in Scopus and Web of Science databases (Appendix C). Thus, the author compared and evaluated the number of results to select warehous* as the one with the highest number of results in the databases focusing, especially on this research warehousing activities. In addition, to emphasize the social and environmental sustainability mentioned in studies, the search AND Boolean operator was used. The author used sustain* as one of the keywords to include its multiple potential variations in research, such as sustainable practices/development, sustainability, etc. The same logic of capturing various social and environmental aspects was applied to get a wider net of results by applying a more streamlined approach for finding literature on socially and environmentally sustainable practices in warehousing.

The second stage of the review protocol, called arranging, included the organization and purification of the publications. The author extracted publications in the Excel format from Web of Science and Scopus databases and codded them according to bibliometric and content reviews. Regarding purification, only article, conference proceedings and book publication types were included, the rest were removed. So, the initial search of keywords returned 497 records from Scopus and 297 from Web of Science databases. In the collected publications from 2016 to 2024, the keywords, without any source type restrictions, hit matches in 361 and 241 studies in Scopus and Web of Sciences, respectively. A slight decrease of a couple of percent was observed in each database after applying the English language filters (350 in Scopus vs 236 in Web of Science). Both databases' search results were retrieved on the 6th of January, 2024. The metadata was converted into Microsoft Excel format, and 193 duplicates were removed, resulting in 601 publications. Publications were organized in the Excel document using coding of author(s), publication title, source type, author name, country of affiliation, author keywords and number of citations. Other types of publications, such as conference reviews (10) and notes (1) were excluded. In total, 459 peer-reviewed articles underwent the purification stage of the review protocol. The author manually screened the titles and abstracts of the articles, excluding studies not related to this research domain. The exclusion criteria were applied to reduce the number of primary found research publications to a subset or “synthesis sample” for follow-up analysis (Durach et al., 2017). This way, nearly half of the research papers were dropped due to their main focus on the economic sustainability of warehouse activities (e.g. financial performance, cost assessment, etc.), chemistry (e.g. pastels, hazardous materials) and military and medicine services. Other title topics outside the scope were energy-efficient building materials, thermal insulation, construction materials and warehouse design. The same was concerned with studies on green building modernization, such as wall insulation and rainwater harvesting. Other studies that were out of the scope of this research discuss warehouse locations in SC networks. Moreover, these studies are not included in the further analysis due to the dynamic nature of inventory and the complexity of cold storage systems infrastructure (Latino et al., 2021). In a similar manner, studies discussing GHG emissions realized from the deterioration of perishable products and preservation technologies, such as in Mashud et al. (2022) and Mishra and Mishra (2022) were not the focus of this research. Also, in light of the current research focus, the environmental and social activities of biodiversity and habitat affected by warehouse activities were left out to be discussed more in future research. Following the abovementioned SLR steps, 43 studies were chosen for descriptive and content analysis after the purification stage.

The final third stage of the SPAR-4-SLR protocol called assessing, comprises evaluation and reporting of the research findings. The author created tables and figures in Microsoft Excel and VOSviewer software.

4. Results analysis

4.1 Descriptive analysis

This section presents the BA of the pool of 43 selected publications on the topic of socially and environmentally sustainable warehousing, whereas all publications' records can be found in Appendix D.

Figure 4 illustrates the number of publications grouped by source type from 2016 to 2024. It is important to note that at the time of data retrieval from databases (the 6th of January), no topic-related research had been published at the beginning of 2024. As can be seen, journal articles account for most study types, comprising nearly 88% (38 articles). Other publication types are conference proceedings (three studies, less than 7%) and books (only one study) on the researched topic. Generally, authors tend to publish articles in the journal to enhance the research visibility because of the higher citation rate of journal papers compared to conference proceedings (González-Albo and Bordons, 2011). Overall, the number of journal articles has consistently increased from 2016 to 2022, while not so many conference proceedings and books were published. In 2022, the number of journal articles was highest at nine.

A growing research interest from 2016 to 2022 can be noticed by analyzing the time span of studies. More studies on the topic started to be published in 2019. A nearly equal number of studies were made in 2019 (six studies), 2020 (six studies) and 2021 (seven studies). In 2022, the peak of research on the topic was published (ten journal articles). However, in 2023, a drop in the number of relevant publications can be easily noticed. Out of 43 publications, most (95%) were multi-authored, while only two publications were single-authored (Appendix E). There has been no particular tendency for increased collaboration in recent years compared to earlier years.

Thirty-one journals published research on the selected pool of literature (Appendix F). The most reviewed articles (four) were published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, followed by three articles in the Sustainability journal. Two articles were published in each journal: International Journal of Logistics Management, Logistics, Management of Environmental Quality and Sustainability. Apart from journals’ titles and the number of published articles, there is a journal contribution to the scholarly represented in impact factor (JIF) in Appendix F. Journal of Cleaner Production with the biggest number of articles, also the one with the highest JIF of 11,10. The prevailing number of journals has an impact factor of more than 4. There is only one ABAC journal with the lowest JIF of 0.55.

In total, 127 authors contributed to the found studies set. However, Perotti, S. authorized the highest number of three publications compared to the rest of the authors. Ten authors (Table 1) contributed to more than one study, which, in turn, means that closer attention should be paid to their research to see further research topic directions. The full list of authors and the number of co-authorized publications is presented in Appendix G.

Table 2 presents the list of countries where affiliation institutions are located and engaged on this topic and a number of their publications in this research area. 43 publications are from 26 different countries across Asia, Europe and Oceania. 14 countries contributed more to the research direction than others. Surprisingly, scaling the first number in e-commerce, The People’s Republic of China and the USA do not do top research in sustainable warehouse practices. Italy (seven studies) is the top-interested country, followed by India and Germany (four studies).

Of the 43 studies retrieved from Scopus and Web of Science, the majority had citation numbers in both databases; however, only a few were available in either one of the databases. This way, 31 studies were from Scopus, while only four were from Web of Science, and the rest were available in both databases. All studies' citation counts collected from Scopus and Web of Science are presented in.

Appendix D. Figure 5 depicts the average rounded-up number of citations count from both databases (vertical axis) by publishing year (horizontal axis). Blue circles indicate the referenced studies. Looking at the graph, studies published in 2023 have not yet received any in either of the databases (for example (Perotti and Colicchia, 2023; Šimić et al., 2023). Additionally, some of this year’s studies (for example, Minashkina and Happonen (2023) have only one citation in Scopus. Recently published studies have needed more time to accumulate as many citations as studies published several years ago. Likewise, there are studies with high citation counts, such as the study by Bartolini et al. (2019), there are 85 citations in the Web of Science and 126 citations in Scopus, with an average of 105 citations from both databases. This indicates that this study has had a significant impact and influence in its field. It is also worth noting that some studies have received a higher number of citations from one database (either Web of Science or Scopus) than another. For example, the study by Ali et al. (2022) received 46 citations from the Web of Science but only 35 from Scopus. The opposite case is with the study by Kumar et al. (2021b) with 54 citations in Scopus and nearly two times fewer citations (28) in Web of Science. So, the visibility and accessibility of a study may differ across different databases, but generally, 72% of publications have more citations in Scopus than Web of Science. The average number of citations per publication was 19.

All publications were categorized according to five research methodologies presented in Table 3 to understand what research methods were used to distinguish certain warehouse practices. Table 4 shows that the research methods were a primary literature review used in most publications to synthesize the existing literature on the topic, followed by developing an analytical model. There are the same number of papers using both a case study to validate findings/approach and an analysis of questionnaire/interview results to verify or disapprove of literature findings.

In total, 170 unique author keywords were identified in this pool of studies. With the help of the VOS VOSviewer, the author analyzed the occurrence of keywords with a frequency of more than two (Figure 6). So, keywords with one occurrence/mention in the list of all studies authors' keywords are not recognized by VOSViewer. Additionally, the author applied the thesaurus list to unity meanings of related words (Appendix H). In addition, this appendix shows the number of keywords mentioned in the pool of literature before uploading to VOSviewer. This way, the generated network of keywords is divided into five clusters in different colors, showing the relationship between topic areas (Appendix I). The size of nodes and fonts and the thickness of the connecting lines illustrate the relationship with other keywords. The size of nodes shows the frequency with which this keyword appears. The most popular topical keyword (most frequently used) is “warehousing” (with occurrence 15) followed by “sustainability” (with occurrence 11) and “green warehousing” (with occurrence 7). The social sustainability-related keywords have lower occurrence among research, being not a dominant keyword in this research area. Authors assigned these keywords to describe their research only in three articles (Dilaver et al., 2019; Aroonsrimorakot et al., 2022; Minashkina and Happonen, 2023).

4.2 Content analysis

4.2.1 Research focus

Before overviewing social and environmental initiatives in warehousing, the content of all 43 studies was analyzed to understand their research aims and deliverables and focus relevance to social and environmental sustainability.

More than half of the studies (29 studies – 76%) discuss sustainable practices in the warehousing context, where 13 articles have purely environmental practices against four articles with social ones and eight contributed to both sides of sustainability. The equal shares of articles (18% from 43) focus on the sustainability of SC and logistics (seven articles in each) with a major focus on environmental sustainability.

Considering the studies' social vs environmental research focus, twice more studies examines practices to enhance the environmentally sustainable practice of warehousing rather than social ones (38 vs 19 mentions). Discussing the environmental sustainability of warehousing, the study of Ries et al. (2017) is one of the most highly cited and profound on this topic, providing a literature review and systematic assessment of warehouse CO₂ emissions in warehousing operations. Continuing to study the state of knowledge of green warehousing, Bartolini et al. (2019) conclude that within green warehousing literature, the most research interest is in exploring energy-saving options, warehouse buildings' environmental impact and green warehouse management in general. Experts ranked green warehousing to be on the top of the most effective and preferred practice of Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM), followed by green production, green procurement, green design, green transportation and green recycling (Ali et al., 2019). However, in the research on GSCM practices in Pakistan by Zhou and Xu (2019), green warehousing practices scored a lower adoption rate compared to green design, green production, GL and reverse logistics. A similar finding belongs to Vienažindienė et al. (2021), who conducted a study exploring GL practices in Lithuania in which green warehousing also did not score a high rate compared to green management and green transport. In a study by Jakšič and Budler (2020), outsourcer companies reported the importance of outsourcing logistics operators to adopt green logistics practices. In the study of Laguir et al. (2021), the authors identified warehousing and green building as prominent practices of GSCM, among other practices (distribution, transport and reverse logistics) in translating proactive environmental strategies orientations into improved environmental performance. GL practices continue to interest researchers, as Aroonsrimorakot et al. (2022) also discovered with the help of SLR what GL can be applied in Thailand. Yangınlar et al. (2022) state the positive effect of green warehousing, supply, packaging and transportation on corporate social responsibility. Jaouhari et al. (2022) researched ways of applying IoT technology for green warehouse inventory management. Oloruntobi et al. (2023) reviewed the literature on green warehousing to reveal sustainable practices to mitigate warehouse impact in industrial sectors.

Other authors, exploring the warehouse’s environmental sustainability, seek ways to lower emissions and energy consumption by adjusting material handling equipment (MHE) to be used in warehouse operations. For example, Facchini et al. (2016) developed a numerical model to select MHE, such as electric vs liquid petroleum gas (LPG) forklifts, to minimize CO₂ emissions. Modica et al. (2021) explore the benefits of energy consumption and GHG emissions reduction from adopting lithium-ion battery (LIB) forklifts as a practice to green warehousing. Carli et al. (2020) looked at energy charging options for forklifts. Smith and Srinivas (2019) develop various check-in simulations to lower CO₂ from inbound trucks. Ali et al. (2022) discuss essential sustainable warehousing practices only from the environmental side. Dimitrov and Saraceni (2023) create a framework to rate only the environmental sustainability of warehouses in different sectors based on automation level and sustainability index. Perotti and Colicchia (2023) also propose a framework with green warehousing intervention strategies synthesized from the literature on the topic of energy-efficiency solutions for warehouse environmental sustainability. Performing a study of automated guided vehicles (AGVs), Aguiar et al. (2019) also highlight the value of promoting environmental and social sustainability in SC.

Continuing to develop the exact environmental sustainability measures, Bottani et al. (2019) aimed to assess the sustainability of a fashion SC using a quantitative model, taking into account both economic and environmental factors. Perotti et al. (2022) developed a set of Environmental Performance Indicators of warehouse splitting by source of consumption and warehousing functional area.

A clear connection between Industry 4.0 and warehouse environmental sustainability can be seen in several studies. For example, Nantee and Sureeyatanapas (2021) examine the effect of Logistics 4.0 initiatives in a warehouse as a part of corporate sustainability. Kumar et al. (2021b) discovered environmentally sustainable practices in a warehouse to move Indian warehouse companies closer to the concept of smart warehousing. Zhen and Li (2022) explored the characteristics of the smart warehousing concept in literature, among which there is environmental sustainability. Ali and Phan (2022) unveil the close connection between Industry 4.0 technologies and economic, social and environmental sustainability concepts. Buntak et al. (2019) also emphasize how Industry 4.0 contributes to and transforms warehousing operations to be environmentally and socially sustainable. Kihel (2022) proposed and assessed a digital transformation of a traditional warehouse toward warehouse 4.0, highlighting the positive economic, social and environmental impact of using the fourth revolution technologies. Šimić et al. (2023) created an evaluation framework that logistics company experts used for evaluating Industry 4.0-based MHEs such as AGV, drones and collaborative robotics based on economic, social, environmental and technical aspects.

Researchers of more than one-third of studies have contributed to measuring warehouse performance from both environmental and social perspectives. Indrawati et al. (2018) introduce a couple of indicators to measure the textile industry’s environmental and social performance warehouse. One of the most promising papers belongs to Bajec et al. (2020), who developed a warehouse performance metrics framework for a warehouse’s environmental and social performance indicators and validated findings in practice. Kusrini et al. (2019) defined KPI for sustainable warehousing (ranked by experts from various spheres) and distributed weighting among them; in this ranking, social and environmental KPIs lost importance compared to economy KPIs. They gave more weight to environmental and social KPIs rather than economic ones. Another study by Al-Minhas et al. (2020) contributes to both environmental and social warehouses by integrating practices green human resources management and sustainable GL. Dilaver et al. (2019) examined the literature and analysis of experts' answers to social and environmental sustainability criteria in a textile warehouse. Two studies by Torabizadeh et al. (2020) and Minashkina and Happonen (2023) stand out from the rest of the publications in the list. Torabizadeh et al. (2020) brought up the socially and environmentally sustainability-related KPIs for WMS based on all three pillars of sustainability of automotive companies in Malaysia, Minashkina and Happonen (2023) demonstrated that existing WMS literature is lacking research in this direction and gathered evidences of such WMS activities, but their findings were quite limited as only 12 peer-reviewed articles contributed to the research of WMS and sustainability.

The minority of studies were entirely devoted to socially sustainable practices of warehouses. The study of Ali and Kaur (2021) focuses specifically on the social pillar of sustainability. Kembro et al. (2017) also address the social sustainability of using network video technology in warehouses. Loske et al. (2021) incorporate social sustainability preventive measures in human work in retail and logistics warehouses. Gruchmann et al. (2021) discussed the ergonomics of working equipment to enhance social sustainability at work.

This chapter gathered and discussed the studies' general contribution and relevance to the current study focus marked on social and environmental sides (Table 5). More comprehensive details on found social and environmental practices are given in the next subchapters.

4.2.2 Identifying environmental and social practices

This section has two subsections describing in detail the exact warehouse practices toward environmental and social sustainability in the correspondingly named sections.

4.2.2.1 Environmental warehouse practices

This article section aims to extract environmentally sustainable warehousing practices from selected literature sources. The selected papers cover a wide range of issues related to the environmental practices of sustainable warehousing.

4.2.2.1.1 Waste generation in a warehouse

Green waste management is one of the sustainable practices adopted in a warehouse (Ali et al., 2022). Green waste management is about eliminating main waste streams such as inventory overload, energy and fuel waste through inhouse transportation, wrongful processing motions, waiting signifying waste of time, energy or opportunity and waste of human capital and potential. Properly chosen mechanical equipment in a warehouse can minimize waste (Al-Minhas et al., 2020). Vienažindienė et al. (2021) propose the introduction of recycling storage wastes (e.g. packaging material, hazardous waste) and their sorting to follow GL. To improve environmentally sustainable performance, Dilaver et al. (2019) suggest looking at crucial criteria such as solid wastes (e.g. the amount of plastic and paper/card waste to protect and pack products), materials disposal, recycling and reusing. Moreover, the use of mobile material handling equipment (e.g. scanners, forklifts) in warehouses contributes to the production of wastes, such as batteries, accumulators, tires, etc. (Perotti et al., 2022).

One of the environmental concerns pursuing sustainable warehousing is research on the usage of packaging material in a warehouse. Based on the literature analysis, it becomes evident that a significant environmental impact of warehousing operations is also associated with packaging materials (pallets, carton boxes, plastic and polyethylene packaging). Kihel (2022) also underpinned the need to measure plastic wastes in kilos and their decrease in a warehouse by treating inventory pallets more carefully (e.g. less dropping and less shocking beverage pallets). Despite this, packaging consumes a significant number of resources and generates considerable amounts of solid waste, wasting plenty of natural resources. For example, minimum use of non-recyclable packaging (Aroonsrimorakot et al., 2022; Oloruntobi et al., 2023) but somewhat organic packaging (Vienažindienė et al., 2021) can reduce warehouse waste. Additionally, by applying a green packaging approach, a company can reduce packaging waste and use recyclable containers and packaging more than once (Yangınlar et al., 2022; Al-Minhas et al., 2020). Additionally, Perotti and Colicchia (2023) considered one environmental strategy in warehousing research about redesigning packaging with more standardised elements and environmentally friendly materials to ease its recycling. When developing green warehousing for a project in Pakistan, the first thing Zhou and Xu (2019) mention is the utilization of recyclable and reusable packaging. Torabizadeh et al. (2020) stand for keeping records of products sold with recycled packaging material. Reviewing the studies related to the concept of GL and green waste management, Aroonsrimorakot et al. (2022) recommend to a warehouse in Thailand a better selection of packaging materials, with the adoption of strategies for less packaging material and volume compact saving materials to reduce storage place and afterward solid waste. Ali et al. (2022) highlight the value of life cycle analysis of goods using eco-friendly green or organic material for packing. In addition, Yontar (2022) and Al-Minhas et al. (2020) support the idea of making packaging from recyclable and biodegradable materials. The study of Yangınlar et al. (2022) aimed to study green food SC practices in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where companies marked their willingness to reduce packaging waste with effective recycling systems with a green packaging approach. Vienažindienė et al. (2021), investigating GL practices, concluded that green warehousing and sustainable management are components of GL practices and found that in the storage field, this is mainly achieved through waste reduction and the use of organic packaging. In favor of using fewer packaging materials, Aroonsrimorakot et al. (2022) suggest that SC actors cooperate to achieve green packaging together. Laguir et al. (2021) emphasized the importance of eco-design and packaging in green SCM. As the actual adoption of the green logistic practice, Jakšič and Budler (2020) highly regarded respondents' interview results implementing a rate of recycling in packaging, which can add to the responsible disposal of waste can be associated with regulatory requirements.

Paperless operations can be achieved with data stored in the cloud. So, cloud computing is increasingly used for storing, managing and accessing data in workspaces. In turn, performing such activities allows easy retrieval of information for more accessible displays, thus minimizing dependence on papers, which reduces CO₂ emissions, solid waste and excess water consumption (Ali et al., 2022). Applying IoT allows to lower waste in a warehouse by ensuring paper-free operations (Jaouhari et al., 2022). Both research of Nantee and Sureeyatanapas (2021) and Minashkina and Happonen (2023) mentioned that WMS enables a firm to transition to a paperless work environment. What was mentioned as one of the green warehousing practices by Yangınlar et al. (2022).

4.2.2.1.2 Environmentally friendly behaviour – working culture

The research of Ali et al. (2022) added the point of establishing a sustainable working culture that should not be limited to ethical working norms but has a broader environment-friendly effect. Examples are adopting more sustainable regular practices for a better environment, such as keeping the premises clean and reducing energy consumption by switching off machines and appliances when not in use to save energy. Thus, this cultural concept is tightly connected with another aspect of employees' training in energy-efficient practices and operations to motivate employees to pay attention to green behavior and sustainable thinking (Ali et al., 2022). Indrawati et al. (2018) also suggested raising warehouse workers' environmental awareness with training. Moreover, Salhieh and Abushaikha (2016) stated that environmentally responsible working behavior can be achieved with the help of training of warehouse personnel to encourage energy-efficient operations to maintain warehouse equipment such as forklifts and their batteries regularly.

4.2.2.1.3 Measuring and monitoring

Monitoring resources positively affects warehouse sustainability. Defining sustainability parameters for SC framework, Gupta et al. (2022) came up with energy consumption (lighting, heating/cooling (HVAC) of a warehouse. Additionally, reviewing the literature, Bartolini et al. (2019) conclude that one of the most discussed topics in green warehousing literature is the environmental impact (energy usage) of warehouse building lighting and HVAC. Poor energy efficiency in such areas leads to more realized CO₂ (Buntak et al., 2019). The idea of identifying environmental performance indicators and adopting sustainability standards environmental was mentioned by Bartolini et al. (2019) and Perotti et al. (2022). Perotti et al. (2022) propose a framework for quantifying GHG emissions by splitting consumption and emissions based on warehouse activity areas (receiving and shipping – 7%, sorting – 22%, put away, storage and picking – 68% and others, e.g. office activities – 3%). For example, energy and water use can be monitored by pursuing green warehousing (Yangınlar et al., 2022). Assessing economic and environmental sustainability dimensions of a fashion SC, Bottani et al. (2019) allocate emissions in a warehouse with AS/RS as a sum of emissions from heating/cooling, lighting and mobile material handling equipment (MMHE) and fixed material handling equipment (FMHE). Bottani et al. (2019) conclude that warehouse emissions are mainly generated by heating and cooling systems. Salhieh and Abushaikha (2016) recommend monitoring gas and electricity consumption and developing pilot programs to reduce energy consumption at a warehouse. Ali et al. (2022) support implementing environmental monitoring and control measures by formulating policies and strategies in favor of sustainability. However, a proper reporting system should monitor and assess the system’s impact based on sustainability performance evaluation. Integrating sustainability reporting is also supported by Ali et al. (2022) to consistently prepare organizations to incorporate sustainability practices in their warehouse functioning. Bajec et al. (2020) did not set an objective of discovering environmental practices but defined environmental metrics for a warehouse’s environmental performance: warehouse emissions, resources and effect on the ecosystem. Performing interviews and evaluating answers of 26 experts, out of these indicators, experts evaluate only 14: so, the most important among them are GHG emission, followed by water consumed, nearly equal to purchased electricity consumed, natural gas consumed, diesel fuel consumed, gasoline consumed, refrigerant gas consumed. Among the scores, less were solid waste and materials used for packaging purposes and transport parameters. WMS, road maps and strategic planning can be used to ensure continuous performance monitoring, comparisons and deliverables (Kusrini et al., 2019). For measuring the environmental performance of a warehouse, Indrawati et al. (2018) propose to include indicators of waste management (e.g. a number of reduce, reuse and recycle activities) and use of environmentally friendly tools rate to allocate the environmental impact of a warehouse. Measuring the digitalization maturity of a warehouse, Kihel (2022) took into account a corporate social sustainability approach that includes measuring number of plastic waste in kilos, CO₂ and energy consumed. Incorporating and measuring sustainability into warehousing operations, Torabizadeh et al. (2020) progress further in research defining 33 KPIs for sustainable WMS, among which environmental measurements can be defined by resources deployed in a warehouse (materials, energy and water consumption) and GHG emission and waste produced from warehousing.

4.2.2.1.4 Technologies for energy efficiency and CO₂ reduction

Integrating various warehouse technologies with WMS brings warehouse environmental sustainability to a new level by reducing emissions and resource consumption (Minashkina and Happonen, 2023). According to Kusrini et al. (2019), the energy storage system is at the top rank of environmental KPIs in sustainable warehousing. Salhieh and Abushaikha (2016) associate the acquisition of energy-efficient equipment as a vital factor of green logistic practices adopted in companies. Oloruntobi et al. (2023) revealed from the literature that automation, energy-saving handling and storage systems add to measures to bring more environmentally sustainable warehouse operations. Assessing the environmental impact of warehouses, Ries et al. (2017) defined energy consumption coming from warehouses from all MMHE, such as forklifts, low-level order picking trucks or AS/RS deployed in a warehouse. Energy consumption of previously mentioned MMHE hinges on the distance and amount of stock movements as well as the particular equipment specifications and respective energy efficiencies. FMHE, such as steady conveyors, is used for persistent storage, retrieval and transport processes within warehouses. Maintaining warehouse equipment regularly is recommended to ensure proper work without extra resource consumption (Salhieh and Abushaikha, 2016). In the research of Bartolini et al. (2019), energy-saving practices in a warehouse are divided into energy consumption in (1) manual “man-to-goods” warehouses (e.g. picking and travel algorithms, batching routing optimization, SKUs location) and material handling equipment (e.g. forklifts, pallet management strategies) and (2) automated storage and retrieval systems (e.g. algorithm optimization models, rack structuring, unit-load multiple-rack sequencing). Nantee and Sureeyatanapas (2021) proposed an opportunity to turn off lights in automated warehouses where no longer warehouse workers are needed. Carli et al. (2020) focus on the possibility of reducing energy consumption and emissions with an optimal schedule of material handling activities of a fleet of electric MMHEs (i.e. forklifts) in labor-intensive warehouses from profit and sustainability perspectives.

Analyzing sustainability measures/practices adopted in warehouse functions for sustainable performance, Ali et al. (2022) developed innovative technologies for considerably reducing resource utility and CO₂ emission rates by optimizing activities. For example, energy saving can be achieved through reduced traveling distance and time duration. Smith and Srinivas (2019) propose using a faster warehouse check-in process by investing in information technologies such as radio frequency identification or an automated kiosk to eliminate long truck queues. Perotti and Colicchia (2023) emphasize in literature optimized travel distance for minimized energy consumption. Kihel (2022) also acknowledged that technologies for the digital transition in a warehouse can reduce CO₂ emissions and energy consumed.

Based on the research of Kumar et al. (2021b), the adoption of intelligent technology can contribute to energy conservation and efficiency, such as automated warehouses, material handling equipment and network video technologies. Aguiar et al. (2019) encourage using AGVs in warehouses, which can result in better energy management and decrease gas pollution. Perotti et al. (2022), studying the logistics site’s environmental footprint, conclude that emission factors depend on the forklift technology as MHE. The reduced environmental impact can be achieved using electric-based instead of fossil fuels-based tools and warehouse equipment (Yangınlar et al., 2022). Nantee and Sureeyatanapas (2021) supported the potential of using automated technologies in a warehouse to reduce non-renewable energy consumption, e.g. the use of fossil fuels, such as oil and liquid petroleum gas, mainly by reducing forklift usage. In the study devoted to green warehousing, Modica et al. (2021) studied the adoption of LIB for electric forklift vehicles as MHE and their impact on warehouse environmental sustainability, being one of the powerful MHE energy sources producing greenhouse emissions. By comparing scenarios of electric forklifts vs LPG powered forklifts, Facchini et al. (2016) built a research idea of minimizing the carbon footprint and energy consumption of MHE. The author concludes that electrical forklifts are more suitable for low-mid weight units than LPG-powered forklifts. Also, Perotti and Colicchia (2023) concluded that mainly three types of forklifts (lead acid batteries, lithium-ion technology, fuel cell/battery hybrid) solutions were discussed in the literature to increase energy efficiency and minimize environmental impact from warehousing. Even though Dimitrov and Saraceni’s (2023) model proved that warehouses with less technology perform worse compared to other warehouses with automation technologies in terms of sustainable operational efficiency, such extensive use of technologies can contribute to higher energy consumption.

Buntak et al. (2019) suggest applying IoT technology, automation, robotics, electrification and sensing to increase the storage system’s efficiency and mitigate the negative environmental impact. Industry 4.0 technologies and the implementation of automation systems can help to reduce energy consumption and CO₂ of warehouse activities (Ali and Phan, 2022) and air pollution (dust and odor) (Nantee and Sureeyatanapas, 2021). AGV outperformed other Industry 4.0 technologies, such as collaborative robotics and drones in the environmental aspects (CO₂, resilience and reusability) (Šimić et al., 2023). Ali and Phan (2022) introduce the model built on IoT for real-time communication between warehouse objects to monitor, mitigate or prevent environmental disasters. As an example, automatic sensors (controlled through an IoT system) help monitor the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system toward efficient energy consumption (Ali and Phan, 2022). Moreover, Ries et al. (2017) identify the primary energy consumption from HVAC and lighting. Jakšič and Budler (2020) claim that the adoption of energy-efficient warehouse heating and lighting systems can help. Bartolini et al. (2019) conclude that most of the energy in manual warehouses comes from heating and cooling systems, whereas in a semi- and fully automated warehouse – from MHE.

Exploring the concept of intelligent warehousing, Zhen and Li (2022) put environmental sustainability at the heart of this concept. In order to achieve equipment automation, smart warehouses must have an interconnection of information involving the top-level design of smart warehouses at strategic and tactical levels. A practical warehouse operations management framework requires integrating processes and functions as operational support. Sequencing and scheduling optimization can lead to energy savings and GHG reductions in a warehouse by optimizing shuttle scheduling problems, class-based storage allocation, shuttle cranes and pick operations. Power-load management is a customer-side system that establishes thresholds to determine excessive electricity consumption during peak periods that should be avoided by, for example, carefully scheduling the battery charging process to minimize electricity prices in peak time and exploring cheaper renewable energy recourses at less cost. Zhen and Li (2022) noted that more energy-saving methods and technologies, such as energy regeneration, green energy sources and power-load management, should be studied and promoted further.

4.2.2.1.5 Efficient use of warehouse storage place and inventory level

Introducing green warehousing practices, Vienažindienė et al. (2021) suggest maximizing the use of warehouse space. According to Ries et al. (2017), warehouse space utilization is essential in determining emissions. Optimizing storage levels also saves energy (Yangınlar et al., 2022). Zhou and Xu (2019) and Ali et al. (2019) advise reducing inventory levels by selling excess inventory, scrap materials and capital equipment as a green practice. Based on the findings of Minashkina and Happonen (2023), WMS enhances inventory management and prevents stock-outs. Oloruntobi et al. (2023) added that WMS increases the energy efficiency of warehouse operations by optimizing warehouse processes and shortening warehouse equipment routes.

4.2.3 Social warehouse practices

The following section of the article gathers socially sustainable practices of warehousing discussed in less than half of the studies. Researching the importance of social sustainability, the authors provide the following practices described below.

4.2.3.1 Warehouse personnel education and training

Numerous studies investigated that training practice highly influences warehouse operations' social sustainability (Kusrini et al., 2019; Bajec et al., 2020; Loske et al., 2021; Nantee and Sureeyatanapas, 2021). Kusrini et al. (2019) demonstrated that all three types of training devoted to occupation health and safety, driving and everyday tasks in a warehouse are considered the most important KPIs for building a sustainable warehouse. Dilaver et al. (2019) emphasized the training of the Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series. Bajec et al. (2020) insist on recording the training type and scope needed to upgrade employee skills. Torabizadeh et al. (2020) advise recording training hours held per employee yearly and a percentage of employees receiving regular performance and career development discussions. The number of hours devoted to safety training is also mentioned as essential to record by (Bajec et al., 2020). Also, Industry 4.0 technology training, e.g. about AS/RS and WMS implementation, develops specific skills from warehouse employees (Nantee and Sureeyatanapas, 2021). Warehouse personnel should be retrained on how to work in the shared working place with collaborative robotics (Šimić et al., 2023).

Additionally, Loske et al. (2021) suggested pursuing the goal of warehouse work ergonomic work education, regular physical training activities together with voluntary and free-of-charge education programs/pieces of training to form sustainable habits. Indrawati et al. (2018) acknowledge that yearly training can improve worker competence and quality of working performance. Among the responsible work practices and environments mentioned by Ali and Kaur (2021), there is a need to establish discussion platforms/grievance panels to clarify work hours, minimum wages and working conditions, provide hygienic workplaces and amenities, coordinate the proper management of hazardous works and plan flexible/average weekly working hours during the night shifts.

4.2.3.2 Ergonomic working conditions

The topic of improving the ergonomics of warehousing activities was also extensively discussed. Dilaver et al. (2019) emphasize ergonomic working conditions inside a warehouse. Al-Minhas et al. (2020) emphasize the importance of balancing the usage of human and nonhuman resources involved in warehouse activities as a component of GL and human resource management. Loske et al. (2021) suggest using in-house forklifts to lift force-intensive and frequently ordered SKUs. For example, launching AGVs in a warehouse can improve workforce ergonomics (most SKUs are transported with AGVs) (Aguiar et al., 2019). Contributing to the popular topic of improving workforce ergonomics, Gruchmann et al. (2021) developed the classification of warehouse automation that can positively influence warehouse work ergonomics. For instance, forklift trucks, scissor lifts, electric pallet trucks, chain conveyors and vacuum lifters increase autonomous transport and picking for moving SKUs. Workplace ergonomics can be enhanced with height adjustment through pallet trucks. Workers' ergonomics can benefit from the help of exoskeletons such as active exoskeletons, passive exoskeletons and chairless working places. While assistance technologies such as handhelds (e.g. scanner), wearables (e.g. hands-free systems), Pick-by-Light, Pick-by-Voice, Pick-by-Vision (e.g. augmented reality) improve workers' ergonomics, ergonomic workstations come of great help too. After the integration of new handling technologies, Kihel (2022) mentioned better workplace ergonomics. In the case of warehouses with intensive manual operations, in favor of ergonomics, SKUs with a high average weight per item can be relocated down the shelves and closer to the dispatch point (Loske et al., 2021). When searching for improved warehouse operations performed by workers, a job rotation mechanism was recommended for versatile work activities. Shift rostering tells how many employees are required to fulfill a particular task (Kusrini et al., 2019). Kihel (2022) showed that applying new material handling technologies in a warehouse decreased absenteeism by reducing force-intensive and repetitive work.

4.2.3.3 Health and safety of warehousing activities

Occupational health and safety have the highest priority among KPIs of socially sustainable warehousing. Warehouse companies ranked practices focusing on workers' health and safety management system as the most important (listed practices include occupational safety, hazards management and hygienic and safe amenities such as scheduled flexible/average weekly working hours, rotations in night shifts, provision of part-time labour) (Ali and Kaur, 2021). Continuing with the topic of socially sustainable warehousing, Kembro et al. (2017) bring up the safety issues by discussing network video technologies to contribute to warehouse workers' safety through human detection to prevent accidents. Similarly, Aguiar et al. (2019) suggest launching AGVs for several reasons. One is the increase in workers' safety in a warehouse (fewer people work in the warehouse area, and AGV can advance detached obstacles and prevent warehouse accidents). Šimić et al. (2023) agreed on increased safety by using AGV and collaborative robotics in a warehouse. Integrating digital technologies helps to ensure better safety (fewer accidents and conflicts) of warehouse activities (Kihel, 2022). Minashkina and Happonen (2023) summarized from the literature that WMS increases warehousing social sustainability by reducing risks of accidents associated with storage (e.g. dangerous and harmful SKUs) and transportation (e.g. forklifts) inside a warehouse. Recording the actual number of work-related injuries (Bajec et al., 2020) and estimating the average annual number/percentage of warehouse accidents can contribute to developing the SC’s comprehensive social sustainability parameters framework (Gupta et al., 2022). Ali and Phan (2022) developed the concept of an IoT-controlled Safe Area to prevent and control interactions and situations that pose a risk or danger as a product-safety assurance in a WMS. Jaouhari et al. (2022) also referred to IoT’s ability to increase the efficiency and security of operations. Buntak et al. (2019) pointed out that dangerous activities in warehouses could be performed by robots using the Cyber-Physical System (CPS), thus reducing the risk of injury and incidents.

4.2.3.4 Warehouse job availability

The topic of job existence in a warehouse is often mentioned as a concern in the literature review because of increased automation and thinking that robots can replace humans. Aguiar et al. (2019) addressed this awareness of people losing jobs due to AGV deployment by the actual requirements of people to set and manage AGV in a warehouse, which, in turn, will require people with qualified skills, which, in turn, means opening up new jobs and employment opportunities. Paying on the same topic, Ali and Phan (2022) believed that low-cost robotics in a factory would still open up new cyber jobs. Ellinger et al. (2020) encouraged businesses to adopt the blue ocean strategy to proactively hire and assimilate people with disabilities to work in a warehouse to respond to the lack of labor force as a positive social impact. A similar point of interfacing WMS with assistive technologies to increase the quality of working life of people with disabilities was mentioned in the research of Minashkina and Happonen (2023). Additionally, Buntak et al. (2019) pointed out that CPS technologies can recognize human movement, allowing employees to utilize robotic assistance while carrying out their duties.

4.2.3.5 Warehouse workers' job metrics

Kusrini et al. (2019), Torabizadeh et al. (2020) and Minashkina and Happonen (2023) recommended tracking social warehousing parameters of employees' performance and employee records, e.g. number of employees, turnover of new employees per year, employee traits (age group, gender, region), wages level, a ratio of a basic salary of women to men and discrimination incidences (Bajec et al., 2020). WMS manages warehouse personnel performance data and work statistics (Minashkina and Happonen, 2023). Kihel (2022) mentioned that new technologies can positively influence corporate social performance indicators. An analysis of a warehouse performance matrix for sustainable warehousing reveals social indicator metrics such as turnover of fired employees, accounting for absenteeism due to sickness or parental leave as a number of absent days per period (Indrawati et al., 2018), the average length of employment (Kusrini et al., 2019). Another social sustainability variable with high scores is workplace diversity and gender non-discrimination by offering equal opportunities to females and transgender people (Ali and Kaur, 2021).

5. Discussion

This research was undertaken to gather sustainable practices that can be incorporated into WMS. To show WMS can be used to increase efficiency, but also to care about the environment and people, as warehouses comprise a major footprint and many people are involved in working there. This article takes the form of SLR with follow-up bibliometric and content analysis of social and environmental warehousing initiatives for WMS to adopt. Below are answers to the initially stated RQs from the introduction section.

• RQ1. What are recent social and environmental sustainability practices in warehousing operations?

Because of the unclear scope of WMS activities contributing to sustainable warehousing, there was a decision made to step from the back and discover in literature what environmentally and socially sustainable warehouse means in literature and how this sustainability is achieved there.

Additionally, the total amount of related literature on the topic is 43, where the majority of publications is presented with articles. According to Paul et al. (2021), if SLR analyses 40 publications, this indicates that the research is on the threshold of its infancy. Noticeably, there is an increasing number of research published last year, which, in turn, indicates a rising interest in the topic in recent times, even though there was a drop in the published research number in 2023. So, the research about the social and environmental sustainability practices in warehousing has entered the maturity stage. The collaborations of more authors in the analyzed pool of studies might be motivated by the increased number of researchers interested in the sustainability of warehousing operations. Surprisingly most contributor to warehousing and sustainability topic research comes not from China, having the largest e-commerce market (Statista, 2023), but from Italy. With citation analysis, it has become evident that the most influential publications-contributors in this research field belong to Bartolini et al. (2019) and Ries et al. (2017) in research of green warehousing. Due to citation time-dependency, recently published research receives fewer citations compared to the older one (Chandra et al., 2022). In the research clusters analysis, it can be concluded that the sustainability topic is strongly connected with the research in warehousing logistics, technologies and environmental sustainability.

Reviewed studies contribute to the topic by investigating different aspects of socially vs environmentally sustainable warehousing and proposing various approaches for achieving sustainability goals in warehousing operations. These practices can be implemented in many ways, from monitoring warehouse activities to utilizing energy-efficient and ergonomic equipment in warehouse work. Researchers find some common social and environmental practices significant in achieving warehousing operations' sustainability. Namely, research has emphasized the necessity of measuring and monitoring warehousing metrics to record and take control of warehouse activities sustainability. From environmental sustainability practices, it is imperative to monitor resources such as consumed energy (e.g. electricity, gas, fuel), water usage and generated wastes. Plus, there are different ways to allocate and calculate GHG emissions in warehouse activities. For socially sustainable practices, it is highly recommended to record and trace employees' performance and working records to achieve better social sustainability. One shared practice to achieve both social and environmental sustainability is through the use of technology. For instance, they are used to achieve better safety and ergonomics for warehouse workers. In other cases, they help to achieve warehouse energy efficiency and reduce emissions. Extensive use of technologies allows to open up new job roles, responsibilities and skills, not available before.

Within the reviewed literature, more studies review just environmentally sustainable practices in a warehouse rather than social practices because researchers have a more noticeable interest in GL and GSCM, while socially sustainable practices in a warehouse are still mislooked. The current finding goes in line with other research indicating a prevailing focus on environmental issues in sustainable SC practices over social ones (Pimenta and Ball, 2014; Ashby et al., 2012; Pimenta et al., 2021). Even though social is essential for achieving overall sustainability, studies often focus on environmentally sustainable practices because of the immediate and tangible gains (the measurability of environmental initiatives). For example, Kalisa and Korytářová (2023) composed a list of 12 cost-saving initiatives (among which are LED systems, solar PV panels, etc.) according to their yearly reduction of CO₂ tones (from natural gas, electricity, water, heat, diesel oil consumption) and their payback period. Based on date, initiatives aimed at electricity consumption reduction are the most efficient in terms of shorter payback period and CO₂ reduction.

• RQ2. How can WMS address these social and environmentally sustainable practices within the scope of warehousing?

This article reviews the current socially and environmentally sustainable practices used in a warehouse. Inspired by the research of Min (2006), Ries et al. (2017) and Perotti et al. (2022), the author has created a model with main processes controlled by WMS, recourses and equipment in a warehouse and allocated extracted sustainable practices from the pool of 43 reviewed publications that WMS should adopt (Figure 7). These practices/actions for WMS were extracted from publications and were divided into socially and environmentally sustainable (marked in yellow and green colors, respectively) and put in a warehouse model. These practices are attached to the areas where they can be implemented. In addition, in the figure, together with practice, there is a reference to the exact publications from where a certain practice was retrieved.

WMS should adopt these sustainable practices to reduce warehouses' environmental impact and create a healthier workplace environment. By incorporating sustainable practices, WMS can reduce its carbon footprint and ensure a healthier environment.

The current exact scope of WMS functions still needs to address both environmental and social sustainability. There is a clear trend among researchers to take care of sustainability by monitoring warehouse activities to evaluate their environmental impact. It is vital to set social indicators and develop a framework of sustainable metrics to measure the warehouse system development path by recording performed warehouse activities, developing environmental performance indicators and even locating warehouses' primary consumption sources, including energy consumption, carbon emissions and waste generation. From the reviewed pool of publications, two emphasize a connection of WMS with social and environmental sustainability. One belongs to Torabizadeh et al. (2020) defining social and environmental FPIs for WMS; however, this study was missing explicit directions on how WMS could achieve these set KPIs, in other words, what activities WMS should perform. Another article with an explicit focus on WMS and social and environmental sustainability belongs to Minashkina and Happonen (2023). However, due to the scarcity of results in the literature, their WMS activities need a more detailed operational exploration. This article could benefit from a more in-depth analysis of these WMS activities.

Notable authors' attention is given to energy sources in a warehouse. They are showing an increasing interest in sustainability topics within the warehousing literature, where energy saving has been the most frequently studied objective, followed by other sustainability concerns. It is important to summarize preliminary studies of warehouse-related emissions and to discuss an integrated classification scheme enabling researchers and practitioners to understand the environmental impact of warehousing. The same could be done by WMS showing performance metrics of warehouse activities related to warehouse environmental sustainability impact. A system can monitor resources deployed in a warehouse (e.g. MHE) and resources consumed during warehousing activities (e.g. energy, water, wastes). By providing real-time data and analytics, WMS could help manage and identify areas where energy and resources are wasted and make adjustments to reduce such waste. By optimizing traveling routes and shipment arrival time, WMS could help ensure inventory is picked up much more efficiently, reducing the fuel/energy used by MHE and the emissions produced. Moreover, the cross-docking function of WMS can help plan goods' arrival and departure from a warehouse in advance to avoid excess resource consumption. WMS can also optimize the scheduling of material handling activities to reduce energy consumption and improve the efficiency of warehouse operations.

Researchers recommend looking at waste streams generated there for sustainable materials flow in a warehouse. It would be beneficial for WMS whether the system can pass green waste management practices in its own operation. As pointed out, WMS can already lead to paperless warehousing operations.

As WMS has a labor-management module, WMS can optimize labor productivity and performance through better planning, staffing and execution. Considering social sustainability, warehouse workers are an essential asset in warehouse operations as additional investments in human capital increase warehouse operational performance (Ramli et al., 2017). The current research has shown various examples of socially sustainable practices that could be integrated into such a labor-management module of WMS to guarantee employees' well-being. Human capital has three dimensions: workers' competency, education and experience (Carmeli and Tishler, 2004). WMS could reflect the labor force metric, schedule educational and health training and ensure ergonomic working conditions.

Companies should not underestimate the value of technologies integrated with WMS to widen their activity scope. There is an emphasized value of integrating technologies in a warehouse that positively correlates with minimizing both environmental and social impacts (Minashkina and Happonen, 2023).

The involvement of warehouse technologies interfaced with WMS can minimize or even prevent unsafe or hazardous situations. According to the reviewed literature, IoT significantly improves the efficiency and security of warehouse operations. Network video technologies can help detect humans and prevent accidents. AGVs can be used to minimize the number of people in the warehouse work area. So these and more technologies can be integrated with WMS to enhance safety and operational efficiency, e.g. by using an equipment safe module in WMS for vehicles' checks (Goomas and Yeow, 2013) or by identifying unsafe driving behavior like overspeeding or harshness in braking (Halawa et al., 2020) as digital logistics is perceived as a key to the sustainability of SC (Bag et al., 2018; Richnák and Gubová, 2021).

6. Conclusion

Warehouses are the backbone of SC, and sustainability is becoming increasingly essential. Social and environmental sustainability in warehouses is necessary to ensure that warehousing remains efficient and profitable while being responsible for the environment and people. This article has explored how social and environmental sustainability can be achieved in warehousing. The gathered environmentally and socially friendly practices in warehousing have served as a baseline for drawing the scope of WMS activities and their functions that can lead to sustainability in these aspects. In this article, an update on the current status of the social and environmental sustainability of warehousing, considering their possible adoption to WMS’s scope of activities, was presented through the descriptive and content analysis of 43 publications in the English language. The current research shows more attention in sustainable warehousing publications to the environmental side of sustainability rather than the social. So, the social parameter is undervalued in warehouse operations. To further understand the potential of WMS to achieve and set sustainability goals, case studies on utilizing WMS for sustainability would be beneficial in enhancing practical applicability. The author overviewed sustainable practices to be incorporated into WMS but did not numerically evaluate their contribution to sustainability, which, in turn, would be interesting to assess in future research.

6.1 Theoretical implications

This research has enlightened the research of sustainable warehousing. This work enriches the existing knowledge about WMS by providing examples of social and environmental practices being adopted by WMS. The research sheds light on the sustainability of using this system. The research enhances the understanding that employing technologies in warehousing can result in improved sustainability. As the current research has shown, WMS cannot be alone a powerful tool to boost warehousing sustainable performance. This is in line with studies of (Sahoo et al., 2022; Soni et al., 2022) highlighting the value of technologies for sustainable operations. Research findings can help to balance both the environmental and social sides of research in warehousing sustainability, as the first area of reviewed research clearly outweighs another in this research findings. This also supports the findings of Dubey et al. (2015) who reported that social sustainability is in the shadow of environmental and economic perspectives in TBL. All three pillars must be balanced to translate complex sustainability challenges (Clune and Zehnder, 2020).

6.2 Managerial implications

There can be several contributions to the practical world from this research. There is a call necessity of reaching SDG by integrating sustainability into business operations (Briones et al., 2021; Matantseva et al., 2021). Businesses should interface sustainability and innovations to have an impact on SDG (Azmat et al., 2023). In the modern world, companies are under continued pressure to provide more sustainable products and services to their customers to achieve the TBL, trying to maintain a balance between economic, social and environmental performance. The articles' outcomes can be helpful for warehouse managers by highlighting the sustainable standard practices in warehousing for WMS that deserve attention. Plus, WMS software developers can address WMS operations aimed at decreasing the environmental and social impact of the company’s warehousing activities. Social and environmental sustainability in warehousing is becoming increasingly important. Companies involved in warehousing activities should be aware of their operations' potential social and environmental impacts and strive to reduce them. They should ensure that they create a safe working environment and provide fair wages for their employees. In addition, by focusing on social and environmental sustainability in warehouses, companies can benefit from increased efficiency, improved public image, lower costs of operation and greater customer loyalty (Raut et al., 2017). With the rise of sustainability awareness, it is essential that WMS adopt sustainable practices to reduce environmental and social impact. By incorporating current environmental and socially sustainable practices implemented in warehouses, WMS can reduce its carbon footprint and ensure a healthier environment for its employees. Policymakers can use research findings to promote sustainable practices in warehouse logistics, as these research highlights can align with sustainable initiatives. For example, the European Union (EU) has set a target of 55% emission reduction by 2030, which will, in turn, contribute to the EU goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 (European Climate Foundation, 2021). As a part of these initiatives, the EU proposed numerous guidelines and policies to encourage businesses to transform their SC models (World Economic Forum, 2022).

6.3 Limitations

The findings of the current research are subject to a couple of limitations. The first limitation of this research comes from using a small set of keywords in the literature search. All selected keywords align with the addressed research question. The author can explain this as an intent to cover various combinations of such keywords. Such keywords are chosen to align with the main research question. However, this keyword list can serve as a basis for conducting more comprehensive research in the future. The second limitation of this research is that the number of papers reviewed were relatively small, comprising 43 publications. So, the generalisability of these results can be subject to certain limitations. However, looking at SLR done in the same area of warehousing, a similar pattern of a small number of literature results can be noticed. For example, Ries et al. (2017) and Bartolini et al. (2019) ran SLRs, using an extensive list of keyword groups to classify knowledge about the environmental sustainability of/green warehousing and found only 19 and 38 relevant publications each. Conducting an SLR of Industry 4.0 technologies toward sustainable warehousing has recently become a popular research topic but has not resulted in a significant number of literature sources, either. For instance, this topic was addressed in SLRs by Ali and Phan (2022) with 46 studies and by Aravindaraj and Chinna (2022), emphasizing Industry 4.0 technologies in warehouses for the achievement of SDG with 63 studies, both up to 2021. A recently published SLR by Minashkina and Happonen (2023), discovering especially research focus areas for WMS and sustainability, found only 12 topic-relevant articles. All of the previously mentioned can add that the topic of warehousing sustainability is in its infancy. What can explain the number of results obtained from the SLR on this topic. Additionally, this can signify the necessity of broader this research, covering multiple databases not limited to Web of Science and Scopus. Moreover, the main research method used in this study was a SLR, which raises the question of the objectivity of results. For this, the author developed a comprehensive criterion describing the selection of publications and followed the SPAR-4-SLR protocol to make the literature retrieval more transparent. Another limitation lies in the fact that the author did not limit the reviewed study to only peer-reviewed journal publications, which usually undergo through a more rigorous peer-review process. What, in turn, can question the validity of the research results due to the inclusion of grey literature sources (Kraus et al., 2020). The author was aware of this limitation and intended to gather all available knowledge on the research domain. However, to enrich these research findings, other grey literature sources, such as government, policy and organizational reports, can be included in the future.

Figures

Figure 1

Navigation over the article

Figure 2

General scope of WMS functions based on the main activities in a warehouse

Figure 3

Three-stage SPAR-4-SLR protocol followed in this research

Figure 4

Studies in groups according to the source type and publication years retrieved from Web of Science and Scopus databases

Figure 5

Average number of citations of 43 studies published in a certain year from Web of Science and Scopus

Figure 6

Co-occurrence of authors' keywords in 43 publications

Figure 7

Environmental (green-colored) and socially (yellow-colored) sustainable warehouse practices extracted from the literature and incorporated into WMS

Table 1

List of 10 authors who contributed more than one article on the topic

Author	Study(ies) authorship
Perotti, S.	3
Facchini, F.	2
Bottani, E.	2
Ali, S.S.	2
Grosse, E.H.	2
Kaur, R.	2
Mossa, G.	2
Digiesi, S.	2
Melacini, M.	2
Neukirchen, T.	2

Source(s): Developed by author

Table 2

List of countries affiliated with warehouse sustainability research

Country(ies)	Article(s)
Italy	7
Germany, India	4
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UK	3
France, Indonesia, Morocco, Slovenia, Thailand, The People’s Republic of China, USA	2
Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Croatia, Finland, Jordan, Lithuania, Malaysia, Netherlands, Qatar, Serbia, Sweden	1

Source(s): Developed by author

Table 3

Description of research methods

Research method	Description
Theoretical and conceptual literature review	Development of a conceptual framework based on theory, standalone literature review, formulation of hypothesis and practical applications are often lacking
Case study	Examination of a phenomenon within its real-life context, investigating and verifying results in practice
Questionnaire/survey/interview	Questionnaires, interviews, collection of factual data about a subject, a research subject
Quantitative/mathematical/analytical model	Simple numeric analysis (e.g. mean, percentage and standard deviation, etc.), as well as more sophisticated analysis (e.g. linear regression, analytical model, simulation), are used
Simulation	Experiments on the reaction of a model, software programs and techniques

Source(s): Adapted from Seuring and Müller (2008), Staudt et al. (2015), Glock et al. (2017)

Table 4

Research methods classification of 43 publications

Reference	Theoretical and conceptual literature review	Case study	Survey/questionnaire/interview	Quantitative/mathematical/analytical model	Simulation
Salhieh and Abushaikha (2016)	X	X	X
Facchini et al. (2016)	X			X	X
Ries et al. (2017)	X				X
Kembro et al. (2017)	X	X		X
Indrawati et al. (2018)	X	X			X
Aguiar et al. (2019)	X	X		X
Bottani et al. (2019)		X		X
Smith and Srinivas (2019)	X	X		X
Zhou and Xu (2019)	X	X		X
Bartolini et al. (2019)	X
Ali et al. (2019)	X		X	X
Buntak et al. (2019)	X
Kusrini et al. (2019)	X		X	X
Bajec et al. (2020)	X
Ellinger et al. (2020)	X
Al-Minhas et al. (2020)	X
Torabizadeh et al. (2020)	X	X	X	X
Jakšič and Budler (2020)	X		X	X
Carli et al. (2020)	X				X
Dilaver et al. (2019)	X		X	X
Ali and Kaur (2021)	X		X	X
Laguir et al. (2021)	X			X
Vienažindienė et al. (2021)	X		X	X
Modica et al. (2021)	X		X	X
Loske et al. (2021)	X		X	X
Gruchmann et al. (2021)	X	X	X	X
Nantee and Sureeyatanapas (2021)	X	X		X
Zhen and Li (2022)	X
Kihel (2022)	X	X		X
Gupta et al. (2022)	X	X		X
Perotti et al. (2022)	X	X		X
Yontar (2022)	X		X	X
Ali et al. (2022)	X		X	X
Aroonsrimorakot et al. (2022)	X
Yangınlar et al. (2022)	X		X	X
Kumar et al. (2021b)	X		X	X
Ali and Phan (2022)	X
Jaouhari et al. (2022)	X	X
Minashkina and Happonen (2023)	X
Oloruntobi et al. (2023)	X
Dimitrov and Saraceni (2023)	X	X		X
Perotti and Colicchia (2023)	X
Šimić et al. (2023)	X	X		X

Source(s): Developed by author

Table 5

Research focus and social and environmental sustainability relevance of 43 studies

Funding: This research was financially supported by a grant from the Foundation for Economic Education (Liikesivistysrahasto).

Appendix

The Appendix for this article can be found online.