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Contemporary logistics embodies the burgeoning and all-encompassing realm of service provision, seamlessly amalgamating warehousing, transportation, packaging, and other facets. The advent of internet technology played a pivotal role in nurturing the exponential expansion of e-commerce enterprises (Agdas & Gencer, 2022), concurrently opening novel vistas for the logistics industry. The aggregate scale of social logistics in China has undergone substantial growth, surging from 125.4 trillion yuan to 283.1 trillion yuan between 2010 and 2018 (Yang, 2021; Pan & Niu, 2022; Yang, 2020; Malindzakova et al., 2022). The data corroborate the escalating exigency for social logistics services; nevertheless, the logistics sphere faces profound societal conundrums, including resource scarcity and environmental degradation. According to the China Post, the number of express parcels in China escalated to a staggering 49 billion in 2018, marked by a recycling rate below 20%. Consequently, this phenomenon induced an annual generation of solid waste of more than 100 billion tons (Xue et al., 2022; Song & Huang, 2022; Deng, 2021). Regrettably, the quandary confronting the logistics domain extends beyond express packaging waste. For instance, the cumulative energy consumption of the logistics sector reached an unprecedented 431.782 million tons in 2018, highlighting the challenges underscored by the inordinate energy use and contamination within the industry. Hence, enterprises and nations should prioritize the pursuit of sustainable development. Although economic advancement remains a cardinal facet, the heedless fixation on transient pecuniary gains, at the cost of enterprise maturation, would be an injudicious course.
Nonetheless, the implementation of sustainable development practices in China persists primarily at the macroscopic level, leaving the microcosmic facet to attain holistic embodiment. As an emerging industry, the logistics sector has struggled to comprehend sustainable development principles. Extant performance evaluation systems tailored to logistics enterprises fixate predominantly on the assessment of fiscal performance. Although some scholars combined pecuniary and nonmonetary indicators in their development of performance evaluation frameworks for logistics enterprises, the ultimate evaluative aim is the prioritization of economic gain, and the pivotal tenets intrinsic to sustainable development are generally neglected (Orji et al., 2022). Thus, the establishment of a performance evaluation apparatus for logistics enterprises within the aegis of sustainable development has become essential. Such an apparatus can not only afford enterprises a panoramic cognizance of their operational terrain but also unravel the lacunae and predicaments ingrained in their operational paradigm. A meticulously crafted performance evaluation framework can galvanize the robust and sustainable growth of an enterprise, fortify its administrative stratagems, and expedite the realization of precise strategic blueprints. Therefore, the conceptualization of such a framework assumes paramount practical and theoretical import vis-à-vis enterprise progression.
By harkening to the theoretical and methodological purview of sustainable development and performance assessment within logistics enterprises, we undertake an analytical examination of the present state of logistics enterprises and their performance evaluation methodologies. Specifically, for this study, we devised an index matrix to gauge the performance of logistics enterprises within the contours of sustainable development, encompassing monetary and nonmonetary benchmarks. The former encapsulates indicators such as solvency, profitability, operational capability, and growth potential, whereas the latter includes indicators, such as innovation acumen, environmental responsibility, and societal responsibility. This composite framework forms the foundation of the evaluative construct proposed in this study. Furthermore, we used a synergistic amalgamation of grey relational analysis and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) to assess the performance of logistics enterprises within the tapestry of sustainable development.