Simulation Decomposition for Environmental Sustainability: Enhanced Decision-Making in Carbon Footprint Analysis

This paper marked an important shift: for the first time, SimDec was applied by a practitioner to his own environmental life-cycle assessment model. Not a demonstration model. Not a finance case. A real carbon footprint analysis of wooden pallets used in global logistics. And yes! He was genuinely surprised by what the decomposition revealed about his own model’s behavior, particularly how some effects disappeared under uncertainty while others became dominant.

The study combines Monte Carlo simulation with SimDec to analyze the global warming potential (GWP) of wooden pallets across their full life cycle. The decomposition examines three key drivers — truck type, disposal method (incineration vs. landfilling), and number of uses — and depicts their scenario contributions onto the full output distribution. The results show that truck type effects largely dissipate under broader uncertainty, disposal method dominates the emissions outcome, and the impact of reuse inverts depending on end-of-life choice. Without decomposition, these multi-variable interactions would have remained buried inside a single histogram. You can also watch the video walkthrough of this case here.