DC Velocity - June 2018

www.dcvelocity.com JUNE 2018 DC VELOCITY 27 unless your suppliers and your suppliers’ suppliers are sustainable. Companies have to realize that people are going to judge them not just on their own internal sustainability efforts but on their entire supply chain’s sustainability.

You really need to conduct a lifecycle analysis of your product’s entire supply chain, and that has to include how the end customer uses the product. It’s not going to mean much, for example, if you are able to build cars using sustainable methods but the cars themselves are going to be polluting when the customer is using them. So the product lifecycle analysis has to look from the mine or the raw-material stage up to the point where the product is discarded, and it has to consider how it’s being discarded. Are you just dumping it, or are you recycling? It’s an entire supply chain issue.

There are more and more tools that enable people to
do this type of detailed analysis, but they can be excru-
ciatingly time-consuming. We have done some work
at MIT that provides a short-cut analysis that can help
companies identify relatively quickly the hot spots in
their supply chain that they should pay more attention
to—for instance, where in the supply chain they are
using the most water or where they have the highest car-
bon footprint or the most waste. We detail three ways to
do this in the book.

QWhat do you think it’s going to take for more companies to make large investments in sustainability?

AAt the end of the day, nothing will change until we have a willing consumer. And right now, people like you and me like to order things from Amazon, where products are being shipped out as onesies or twosies with all the packaging that that involves. That’s not sustainable. But who is going to give up buying online? That’s a question I always ask my students: “Who’s willing to pay more for sustainability?”

Everybody raises their hands. Then I ask, “Who’s willing to stop ordering online because it’s not sustainable?” No one raises their hand. Until consumers are willing to give up some convenience, it’s not gong to happen, at least not in any scalable way.