At the end of last month I attended the 4th Sustainable Supply Chain Summit in Union square in San Francisco. Despite being an intimately sized audience, big name corporate speakers and attendees such as P&G, HP, Whirlpool, Verizon, Cummins, and others were present. Attendees came from a mix of large companies, consulting firms, and supply chain vendors.

As I mentioned in my pre-conference blog post, I was most interested in learning about technology solutions for resource footprint inventory and reporting, and life cycle based product and procurement innovation. My expectations were met and I took away some interesting tidbits on these topics:

• Proctor & Gamble released an open source supplier sustainability scorecard in May of this year. Its purpose is to be a simple, easy-to-use tool for P&G to collect resource footprint data (e.g. carbon emissions, energy use, water use, waste produced, etc.) from its suppliers. Interestingly, P&G is urging its suppliers, partners, competitors, and companies in other industries to copy and use the tool. This emphasizes an overarching topic of the conference--how to collaborate with suppliers and other companies in order to ‘de-carbonize’ or ‘green’ supply chains without over surveying and burning out suppliers.
• Whirlpool is focusing its corporate sustainability strategy on its products and operations. The company uses life cycle analysis (LCA) to determine the greatest negative environmental impacts of its products and makes efforts to reduce those impacts. For example, the use phase is most resource consuming for many appliances that Whirlpool makes--dishwashers, washers, dryers, etc.--so the company is making them more energy and water efficient. With regard to its shipping strategy, Whirlpool can’t make its products smaller like consumer product companies can, so instead works to eliminate redundancies in distribution to save resources.
• PG&E is working on greening its supply chain using life cycle analysis. It is partnering with UC Berkeley and Climate Earth in order to conduct a top-down hybrid LCA analysis. The first step in this work is using economic data (EIO-LCA) to identify the carbon and energy hotspots in its supply chain. From this information, PG&E can then develop reduction strategies including working with their suppliers to measure, target, and manage resources and emissions.
• Applied Materials talked about its involvement in the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) and their goal of de-carbonizing the supply chain. The group wanted to implement a low-cost technology solution to get Scope 3 primary resource data from the supply chain instead of using expensive LCA tools. Based on the many, diverse needs of the EICC member companies there were too many requirements for the tool that they ended up customizing. It resulted in a complex, unusable solution so the group has resorted to using simple spreadsheets (like P&G’s) until they can come up with a more usable, digitized solution.

More information on the topics covered in this blog post are available though AltaTerra resources. AltaTerra has a deep understanding of the solutions market for corporate sustainability managers. We have covered the topics of life cycle analysis in two of our recent online executive conferences. Also, we have produced a report on enterprise carbon and resource management.