Maximizing recyclability and reuse of tertiary packaging in production and distribution network

Tertiary packaging is necessary for transportation in any production and distribution network because of the benefits in enhancing the logistics efficiency. However, in the meantime, it produces a lot of packaging waste every day. In fact, some tertiary packaging after transportation may still be in good condition and can be collected back for reuse. However, this has not been widely studied in the existing literature. The purpose of this research is to fulfill this research gap. Accordingly, the contribution of this paper is to propose a new optimization methodology, named modified Genetic Algorithm with Crossing Date heuristic, to maximize the collection of used tertiary packaging for reuse, meanwhile minimize the total operating cost by taking the advantages of simultaneous optimization of a multi-day planning. From the numerical experiments, it is found that the optimization ability of proposed new optimization methodology outperform the traditional genetic algorithm by a maximum of about 10%. In addition, the total operating cost is found can be reduced by using the proposed multi-day planning approach.