Workshops and Consulting Services

This month Green Edge focuses its sustainability lens on green supply chains and what that means for the supplier. Although the momentum for climate change legislation and regulation has slowed here in the U.S., leading companies throughout the world continue to pursue green strategies as a means to enhance performance and profits. In addition to greening their buildings and operations, these companies are aggressively wringing waste, cost and emissions out of their supply chains.

So what does that mean for suppliers—- the millions of companies whose very existence depend on selling goods and services to the Ikeas, Procter & Gambles and General Electrics of the world?

For suppliers that are effectively managing their carbon footprint—- reducing the resources they consume and the waste they create—- and providing products that are carbon footprint solutions for their customers, this is good news.

For those suppliers that are not working on reducing their carbon footprint and whose products do not provide carbon footprint reduction solutions for their customers, their increasing obsolescence is inevitable, in our opinion.

Here are the two key questions that we recommend suppliers ask themselves, not only to preserve, but to increase their competitive prowess, given the importance of sustainability as a mainstream concern throughout the world:

Do your products provide a carbon footprint reduction solution to your customers?  

If you are a supplier to Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Pepsico or Unilever, all of whom have pledged to phase out HFC refrigerants completely by 2015, you’d better be able to say yes. If you manufacture or sell lighting equipment, you’d better be able to say yes, as improvements in lighting technology continue to meet the demands of companies like Best Buy, Deutsche Bank and Simon Property Group for lighting that provides greater energy efficiency and longer useful lives.

Is your company managing its carbon footprint? 

If you are a vendor to Home Depot, Citibank, Johnson & Johnson or IBM, you’d better be able to say yes. These and other corporate giants throughout the world are factoring environmental stewardship into their evaluations of existing and prospective vendors. Efforts on the part of their vendors to measure, monitor and reduce their energy, water and waste are becoming increasingly important as these and other corporate behemoths use green supply chain management initiatives to reduce costs and expand the emission benefits of green initiatives beyond the four walls of their own operations.

Leading corporations are evaluating the environmental stewardship of their vendors.