Widespread adoption of green vehicles in urban logistics may contribute to the alleviation of problems such as environmental pollution, global warming, and oil dependency. However, the current adoption of green vehicles in the last mile logistics is relatively low despite many actions taken by public authorities to overcome the negative externalities of distributing goods in cities. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on studies investigating the adoption of green vehicles in urban freight transportation, paying specific attention to e-commerce. To shed light on the adoption of green vehicles in city logistics, the paper conducts a systematic review of the empirical literature on the topic. The 159 articles reviewed were classified into the following: (a) Optimization and scheduling (67 papers); (b) policy (55 papers); (c) sustainability (37 papers). Among the 159 articles, a further selection of 17 papers dealing with e-commerce, i.e., studies that highlight the most relevant aspects related to the integration of green vehicles in e-commerce urban logistics, was performed. Our findings indicate that green vehicles are competitive in urban deliveries characterized by frequent stop-and-go movements and low consolidation levels while incentives are still necessary for their adoption. The use of autonomous vehicles results the most promising and challenging solution for last-mile logistics.

An extensive and updated review of 223 values about the embodied energy and carbon of building insulation materials, mainly retrieved from 156 Environmental Product Declarations, is proposed with attention to innovative and emerging insulation materials. Comparative analyses were carried out thanks to the adoption of the same functional unit (1 m² with a thermal resistance of 1 m²K/W and a design life span of 50 years) to assess the consistence of reference values and the main sources of variability. The comparison suffers from many uncertainties and variance decomposition was employed to verify the main drivers of variability in the dataset elaborated. Data about traditional insulation materials show the lowest ranges of variation when reported per functional unit while the definition of reference values for innovative and unconventional insulation materials was quite difficult due to the low values found and their high variance. Traditional inorganic insulation materials exhibit competitive embodied impacts (glass wool: 16–31 MJ/FU and 0.6–1.2 kg CO₂eq/FU; stone wool: 21–66 MJ/FU and 1.4–4.2 kg CO₂eq/FU) if compared with fossil fuel derived (EPS: 44–78 MJ/FU and 1.9–3.5 kg CO₂eq/FU) or many emerging super-insulating solutions (aerogel: 251–372 MJ/FU and 11.6–18.7 kg CO₂eq/FU). Density is an important variability carrier for glass wool, stone wool, and EPS.

The growing attention to sustainability and life cycle issues by European and international policies has recently encouraged the adoption, in the construction sector, of environmental labels able to quantify the impacts on environment associated with the fabrication of several building materials, e.g., their embodied energy and carbon. Within this framework, since walls represent a large percentage of building mass and therefore of embodied impacts, this article collects and analyzes nearly 180 Environmental Products Declarations (EPDs) of wall construction products such as masonry blocks and concrete panels. The data related to the primary energy (renewable and non-renewable) and the global warming potential extracted from the EPDs were compared firstly at the block level (choosing 1 kg as functional unit), enabling designers and manufacturers to understand and reduce the impacts from wall products at the early design stage. As the design progresses, it is therefore necessary to evaluate the environmental impacts related to the entire wall system. For this purpose, this paper proposes a further investigation on some simple wall options having similar thermal performance and superficial mass (the functional unit chosen in this case was equal to 1 m² with R ≈ 5 m²K/W, Ms ≈ 260 kg/m²). The outcomes showed how the durability of the materials and the potential of disassembly of the wall stratigraphies can play a crucial role in reducing the environmental impact. This paper provides a methodological reference both for manufacturers to reduce impacts and for designers committed to the application of environmental labeling in the design process since they will now be able to compare their products with others.