Supply chain management: Greening the supply chain

Back in July, Wal-Mart announced plans to have all of its suppliers calculate and tag their products with the full environmental costs of making those products.

Now, this isn’t going to happen tomorrow. In fact, Wal-Mart has not announced a timetable for this new initiative. Still, if Wal-Mart follows through, I think this initiative could have more of an impact – and, potentially, provide an opportunity – for leading supply chain managers as well as supply chain solution providers, including the automated materials handling industry.

Some of that is already happening. Supply chain network design software has been one of the fastest-growing, if not the fastest-growing, supply chain management applications two years running. Many of these applications include the ability to calculate the carbon associated with a particular supply chain design.

For more evidence, check out Hot Job: Calculating Products’ Pollution, a story in today’s Wall Street Journal that found that professional pollution calcullators, or “pollution counters,” is one of the the fastest growing industry sectors today. And the Wal-Mart initiative, the WSJ posits, just may “create a boom for the pollution-counting profession.”  

The Journal pointed out that the in-house pollution calculating group at DuPont has grown from three to 10 members in the past six years, and that companies like New Balance are using assessment teams and tools to decide which has a greater environmental impact: The materials that goes into its shoes of the distance traveled to ship them from where they are manufactured?

This is a subject we want to explore and report on this year in Modern. So, I’m curious. If you work for a consumer packaged goods company, or another supplier to Wal-Mart or one of its big box competitors, what are you doing to calculate the carbon footprint of your supply chain? More importantly, what steps are you taking, if any, to make your manufacturing, distribution and logistics processes greener? Let me know by posting a comment below or e-mailing me at Robert.Trebilcock@myfairpoint.net.