Packaging plays a necessary supporting role in offshore logistics, but it also contributes to material use, waste generation, and greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions. Within the logistics operations of Heerema Marine Contractors (HMC), the environmental impact of packaging had not previously been quantified in a structured way, and the benefit of replacing the current single-use system with reusable alternatives was therefore unclear. This thesis develops and applies a comparative decision-support framework to assess packaging-related GHG emissions in offshore contractor logistics and to evaluate whether reusable packaging can reduce that impact. The study focuses specifically on packaging production, transportation, and end-of-life treatment, and is limited to GHG emissions expressed as CO₂eq.

The framework was applied to historical package-flow data extracted from the HMC ERP system for the period 2012–2025. Because packaging characteristics are not recorded systematically in the ERP, packaging configurations were reconstructed using package-assignment rules based on unit of measure, package weight, density assumptions, and transport-support logic. The resulting model combines package interpretation, transport reconstruction, end-of-life modelling, and yard-based validation to estimate the emissions of both the current single-use packaging system and a proposed reusable alternative.

Validation showed that ERP package labels do not always reflect physical packaging practice and that some informal reuse already occurs in the current system, meaning that the baseline should be interpreted as a conservative approximation of a predominantly single-use system.

The results show that the current packaging system is dominated by wooden transport items, particularly pallets and dunnage. Across the full study period, the estimated total mass of single-use packaging was 1546 mt, with corresponding emissions of 1141 mt CO₂eq under cut-off accounting and 783 mt CO₂eq under system-expansion accounting. For the in-house subset used in the reusable comparison, the baseline reusable scenario yielded only a marginal net benefit of 4.3 mt CO₂eq under cut-off accounting, while under system expansion it performed worse than the single-use baseline by 101.5 mt CO₂eq. Sensitivity analysis further showed that the comparative outcome is influenced more strongly by reverse-logistics performance than by reusable transport-item lifetime.

The thesis therefore concludes that packaging-related GHG emissions can be assessed systematically in a data-constrained offshore environment, but that reusable packaging should not be regarded as an inherently superior solution for HMC. Any potential benefit is limited, highly context-dependent, and sensitive to both accounting assumptions and operational conditions.