Energy Issuesin Sustainable Retailing: A Systematic Literature Review

In addition to playing a very important role as an intermediary between producers and end consumers, retail has an economic role, for example in terms of providing employment opportunities and contributing to GDP (gross domestic product). However, retail also faces several issues related to sustainability, such as consumerism, food waste, energy efficiency and carbon emissions in retail transportation activities. These issues are always related to energy. For example, carbon emissions from transportation activities are closely related to fuel consumption, and storing goods in cold storage is related to energy efficiency. This fact makes research on energy issues in the context of retail operations that support sustainability important. Therefore, in this paper, we comprehensively review and synthesize the literature on sustainable retailing by focusing on energy issues. The articles were collected from the Scopus database and filtered using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) framework. The analysis continued by applying k-means text mining to form research topic groups in a retail sustainability context. After that, the characteristics of the papers in each group are analyzed. The results show that articles related to sustainable retailing can be grouped into four clusters, with the following characteristics: 1) energy issues related to food waste; 2)energy issues related to cooled storage; 3) energy issues related to general energy issues and energy efficiency, including green models in retail buildings; and 4) energy issues related to transportation in retail. Finally, the research gap and potentialresearch directions related to sustainable retailing issues are explained.