Building a company that will prosper in the long
term isn’t just about cutting fuel consumption
and saving energy, says Dale Rogers. It’s also
about ethics, social responsibility, and
environmental stewardship.
SUSTAINABILITY IS ABOUT A LOT MORE
than saving energy, says Dale Rogers.
It’s also about adopting business and supply
chain practices that ensure a long life for a company, argues Rogers, who is professor of logistics
and supply chain management and co-director of
the Center for Supply Chain Management at
Rutgers University. And it involves practices that
pay off not only in building a reputation for corporate good citizenship, but in long-term prosperity.
Perhaps best known for his
research on reverse
logistics, Rogers has
turned much of his
attention to the topic of sustainability
in recent years. At his former post at the
University of Nevada-Reno, he led a major
research project on sustainable supply chains,
work that he is continuing at Rutgers. Rogers is currently writing a book
on the topic with a former University of Nevada-Reno colleague, Craig
Carter (now at Arizona State). In a nod to Philip Crosby’s classic
text Quality Is Free, Rogers and Carter have given their book
the working title “Sustainability Is Free.”
Rogers says his interest in the topic was sparked by a con-
versation with a Hewlett-Packard executive during a plane ride
to a reverse logistics conference. She told Rogers that she was attending the
conference as part of a broader effort to make H-P a sustainable company.
“I knew by the end of the ride that I had to write a book about this,” he says. “It is safe to say this
is a big idea.”
Although companies often equate sustainability with energy conservation, that’s just a small part
of the picture, Rogers says. “It is not just a green, environmental movement. It is about being ethi-
cal and honest. It is about how to make something last for a long time. It’s about increasing pro-
