DC Velocity - February 2012

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tices more sustainable?

AClearly, one of the most important hings is just figuring out where you are. Before you can really innovate, you have to know what’s going on in your supply chain.

Initiatives like the consortium can help us better measure sustainability. Companies and government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can collaborate in this space without a lot of risk in general for companies around competition. There is a lot of concern about sharing too much. But at this stage, businesses can effectively collaborate with one another in a pre-competitive way. They can compete on it later once the standards are developed.

QYou noted that some companies are concerned about the potential competitive risks with this program, but isn’t there a greater risk if you don’t start embracing green initiatives?

AYes. There’s a lot of pressure on com- panies right now to reduce the environmental impact of their operations. There is also emerging legislation around that kind of thing. So, it does create a greater risk in the organization.

There’s another perception around sustainability—that it doesn’t reduce costs, it adds costs. Those might be compliance costs or extra costs associated with transparency, for instance. There is probably some truth to that, that in some cases it will add cost. But this is not the right lens to have on. If you think from the perspective that it is going to reduce your costs, then you begin to see all these opportunities.

QSo what comes next?

AIt turns out that there’s a lot of data collected by companies about these issues and there are even some large databases that contain life-cycle analysis information. The next step would be to pull this together. Can we establish baseline measurements for a particular kind of product, like a soup can? Once we have ways to measure the sustainability of a consumer product and achieve some consistency across the supply chain in measuring it, then companies will be competing on it. ;