Once you see the total cost of an item, and really think of
all the things that took place to get it to you, then you start
looking at waste and environmental impact and carbon
footprint through a different optic. That’s a conversation you
can have with the customer. — EDGAR BLANCO
Now we see what rising sea level means.
Exactly, and there was the movie Inconvenient
Truth, and lots of media attention to global warming. We tracked the number of articles that talked
about greenhouse gases and global warming, and it
increased 10-fold in 2008 compared to 2006.
In addition to regulation and global warming
attention, we had the spike of oil prices.
And, fourth, we began to see some companies
start talking seriously about sustainability as a source
of competitiveness. I’m not sure it’s a widespread belief in the corporate world, but the conversations
have started. More talk about reusing and recovering
materials, the closed loop of a product.
So people are looking at some cost considerations
that were taboo before, because organizations are
starting to listen to ideas that are out of the box.
And that’s a result of looking through the sustainability lens. Companies are talking about tradeoffs,
like something being a little bit more expensive here
but producing other values in my supply chain
there — like spending a little more in transportation if it brings a better carbon footprint overall.
The supply chain part of an operation is pretty
uniquely positioned to look around a company
for areas where the interests of several departments are aligned — or maybe collide.
I agree completely that that opportunity lies in supply chain organizations. They are the parts of the
company tasked to look at partners, even beyond
partners, even beyond customers.
One question is, why weren’t they looking at sus-tainability-related concerns before? And the answer
is, partly because there was not a lot of acceptance at
the corporate level, and partly because that was not
part of what they thought they should be doing.
Now that the corporate piece is ready, the question becomes, can I communicate these things
effectively within the organization as I look for this
opportunity? I need to know not only the language
of the business case, which the old boys know how
to do, but the language of sustainability. How can I
measure outcomes environmentally? How can I
justify a tradeoff on, say, more emissions but less
water? How do I manage this complexity?
That’s where I believe supply chain now can do a
great service to the company.
If we were to make a checklist of the places we
might look inside a company for new opportunities to align competitive goals with sustainability
goals, what would be on the list?
The first thing is to start from zero on your packaging. Packaging determines lots of the movement
and lots of the constraints in your supply chain.
Say what you mean by “start from zero.”
When you design the package of any product, that immediately constrains lots of things you can do with it.
I have one right here that is a great idea — I’m holding
the new Poland Spring bottle, which is a “green” bottle. It’s a perfect example of a total package redesign
that not only satisfies the customer but satisfies the
whole sustainability aspect. This bottle is extremely
fragile: The weight has been reduced significantly, it
uses less material. Look at this cap: It’s one-third the
size of a regular cap. When the bottle is empty, you
can recycle it very quickly. And yet its stackability,
when it’s full of water, is the same as before.
So you start from zero. Whenever you have
a package that is round, weird-shaped, very mar-keting-oriented, it requires a big box around it so
it can be stacked. That’s wasted space and wasted
material. Looking at packaging is a fairly straightforward first step that you can take.
Could this bottle be greener if it were square?
In this particular case, maybe. Maybe square and
shorter. Maybe greener in terms of you can stack more
