Green – the DNA of your supply chain
With the GLOBE 2012 conference in full blossom this week at our very own Vancouver Convention Centre, it’s hard for me not to talk about business environmental sustainability in this post. I mean – there needs to be some way for me to vent my excitement for some of the workshops I’ve sneaked into as a volunteer and there’s no better way to do it than here. Laura’s blog on greenwashing focused on what companies said they were doing but were not actually doing, but I would like to focus on the exciting things that are being done by businesses to address environmental responsibility. Today, I’m going to focus on green supply chains. How do we along each step of a product’s life – from production to transportation to the end user – reduce environmental impact? This video offers a brief introduction:
While this video gets us thinking about how far each of our products have come along, it doesn’t address how businesses might go about reducing their environmental impact. Turns out greening a supply chain isn’t all that complicated, it comes down to squeezing more value out of current operations. 
As the above image shows, most sustainable activities for businesses start with compliance. Regulatory measures only take businesses so far though as businesses start to view supply chain sustainability as a key competitive advantage. As Dave Meyer explains in his blog, the ISO 14001-2004 certification is becoming the industry standard in determining marketing channel partners in the risk of losing customers and increasing costs.
IBM is an example of a company that pushes the envelope even more. In Andrew Winston’s blog, he introduces the Electronics Industry Code of Conduct (EICC) and IBM’s initiatives to mandate its marketing channel partners to adopt environmental measures.
In short, IBM is asking for four things and telling suppliers they must:
- Define and deploy an environmental management systems (EMS).
- Measure existing environmental impacts and establish goals to improve performance.
- Publicly disclose their metrics and results.
- “Cascade” these requirements to any suppliers that are material to IBM’s products
This culminates to the costly venture of life cycle analyses of each and every product. This means tracking the footprint of every step of a product and by measuring, being able to measurably improve environmental impact. Apple has already done this and reported on their results:
Andrew Winston ends his post by saying:
IBM execs know that the green path is a profitable one, so they’re pushing suppliers to operate leaner, better, and smarter. As Balta says, “Our goal is not to punish people, but to have them succeed.
My wish is for this to ring true with all businesses in the near future.