Reuse pays off

The price of a transport crate tells only part of the story. What matters is the cost incurred throughout its use. This is where the TCO-based analysis comes in: drawing on the Total Cost of Ownership method, it considers not only the packaging itself, but also labour, storage, transport, return logistics and disposal.

The study examined five practical supply chains for apples, oranges, grapes, mushrooms and tomatoes. The result: reusable packaging is more cost-effective in four out of five baseline scenarios, with average cost savings of 11.6%. The analysis also identifies the factors that particularly influence cost-effectiveness, such as packaging prices, transport distances and truck capacity utilisation.

• Reusable crates are more cost-effective than single-use crates in four out of five baseline use cases.
• Using reusable crates delivers average cost savings of 11.6%.
• Only in the “Mushrooms from Poland” use case do single-use crates incur slightly lower costs in the baseline scenario (0.4% less).
• In almost all use cases, procurement costs or usage fees are the largest cost component, followed by transport costs from the packer to the central warehouse.
• The exception is the “Oranges from Spain” use case, where transport costs clearly dominate due to the comparatively long distance.
• The scenario analysis shows that the results remain largely robust when the underlying parameters change.