Methodology 

The life cycle assessment technique was used to analyze the environmental impact of the considered transport scenarios from frozen food. Furthermore, since EPS-Packaging plays an important role in distributing frozen food without external cooling, a testbed was built to measure the force required to reduce the dimensions and disposal of such packaging. 

Life Cycle Assessment of  logistics processes

Life  Cycle Assessment is a way of determining the environmental sustainability of products or services. This is a  standardized procedure, which is described in DIN EN ISO 14040 \citep{ISO14040a}[8]. The goal is a  holistic view of the entire way of life in order to be able to make a  quantifiable and comparable statement about the resulting environmental effects. The results obtained are related to the functional unit in order to create a comparability to other LCA results. According to the standard, an LCA  is divided into four phases: Goal and Scope Definition, Inventory Analysis, Impact  Assessment and Evaluation/Interpretation. The process of accounting is described as an iterative procedure so that not only one-way connections exist between the individual phases. It may happen that in a phase new knowledge or questions arise that require a return to the previous phase. This connection of the individual sections is shown schematically in Fig. \ref{747750}. The first phase of the objective definition and definition of the study framework serves to define all the basic assumptions, describe the product system to be investigated and formulate the question which is to be answered by the LCA. It is also necessary to determine the functional unit, which is the reference value for all results.  In the phase of Inventory Analysis, all required materials and energies are determined and combined with their respective quantity necessary for the production of a product or the provision of the service. For this purpose, a  distinction is made between input and output flows that either flow into the product from the environment or vice versa, from the product into the environment. At the end of this phase, an overview of all material and energy flows will be available. The following step is the Impact Assessment where the previous results are used to calculate the values for different impact categories. This means that all substances or energies from the Inventory Analysis are assigned to the impact categories considered and then indicated by a  specific characterization factor as a multiple of the respective basic unit.  One of the possible categories is the climate change, characterized by the  Global Warming Potential (GWP). For this category carbon dioxide (CO2)  is the comparative value to which all results relate and are given in the form of kg CO2 equivalents (CO2e). As one example, methane (CH4)  has a value of 23 kg CO2e and therefore the emission of 1 kg methane means 23 times more GWP compared to carbon dioxide. The accounting is concluded with the Interpretation, where the results from the three previous sections are evaluated critically and conclusions are drowned. The changes in parameters can be used to identify different scenarios as possible future developments are made when changes are made to the product or processes. The special challenges of LCAs occur in the procurement of directional and initial values for special materials or processes \cite{KlöÖko2009}. There are a number of databases (Ecoinvent,  ProBas, ELCD, etc.) that may not contain all the values and in some cases the present values are unsuitable for the specific application. As a rule, the values for transports are given as a mathematical product of mass and distance covered in the form of tonne-kilometers. There are some scientific studies on the distribution of frozen foods that use these values, but therefore they are only partially comparable to other distribution scenarios [11]. This is problematic when goods are transported that have a very low density but a high volume at the same time, such as Styrofoam packages. In order to obtain comparable results, there has to be a combined volume and weight-related determination of the transport costs. However, this requires a deeper consideration of the stowage and an estimation of cargo loading factors for certain sections of the route. The cargo loading factor is an indicator of the utilization of the vehicles, which is calculated as the quotient of used and offered transport capacity [12]. The transport capacity can be either the weight of the maximum payload or the load volume. In the case of the latter,  the ratio of volume and weight has to be observed in order not to exceed the permissible total weight. Since in most cases the weight is the limiting factor, in the following the volume-related cargo loading factor is used to show which volume reserves are still available. In particular, in the case of round trips the specific allocation of emissions is not trivial since the cargo loading changes dynamically. In the delivery process, the volume to be transported is gradually reduced, which is why theoretically the first delivered product would have to be allocated fewer emissions than the last product. However, since this can not be resolved properly, there has to be found an appropriate value for the average utilization or a cargo loading factor in order to evenly distribute the resulting emissions to all products of a  delivery trip.