Shining a Spotlight on the Supply Chain
Major retailers set a new standard for transparency
Patagonia's The Footprint Chronicles tracks the environmental impact of the store's products. Watch a demo.
Supply Chain Innovation
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Do you know where the cotton in your T-shirt was grown or how much pollution was generated by its production? If that T-shirt was made by Patagonia, you could easily find out.
Supply chains are, for the most part, opaque. But a handful of companies, such as Patagonia, are working to make their supply chains more transparent—boldly letting their customers, activists and competitors see their strengths and their weaknesses.
The Ventura, California-based firm has created a path-breaking website called The Footprint Chronicles that invites consumers to track the impact of specific Patagonia products from design through delivery.
T-shirts, for example, the most popular clothing item sold by Patagonia, are designed in Ventura, made with cotton grown in Turkey, produced in Los Angeles and then shipped from a warehouse in Reno. The company reports on "the good"—it uses only organic cotton and customers may recycle their used T-shirts—as well as "the bad"—growing cotton is water-intensive and "no form of agriculture is fully sustainable."
A single T-shirt travels 7,840 miles, generates 3.5 pounds of CO2 (eight times its weight!) and requires about 4.7 kilowatt-hours of energy to produce.
First traceable jewelry
But Patagonia is a relatively small firm, which limits its impact on its suppliers and on the global environment. Not so with Wal-Mart. That's why a new jewelry offering branded as "Love, Earth" launched by the giant retailer in 2008 is so intriguing. Love, Earth is an attempt to source and market more responsible jewelry.
In essence, Wal-Mart is beginning to trace its gold and silver, which are traded globally as commodities, from the retail store back to the mine, in an attempt to exercise influence over the mining industry, one of the dirtiest businesses on earth. By doing so, Wal-Mart is seeking to distinguish the gold in its jewelry—mined with certain standards through a relationship with a particular mine—from the gold that comes from unknown and likely more environmentally and socially damaging sources.
Carbon labeling
In a similar vein, UK-based retailer Tesco began testing last year an ambitious initiative to label products with their carbon content. Twenty products in all—including varieties of orange juice, potatoes, energy-efficient light bulbs and detergent—were part of the pilot. Tesco supplier Walker’s Crisps (a PepsiCo company) embraced the initiative as an opportunity to make process improvements. The company reports reducing energy use per kilogram of crisps by 33%.
Opportunities for broader change
This kind of traceability in supply chains can make a real difference: It made possible the organic food movement, as well as certification efforts that have been applied to coffee, forest products and seafood, among other things.
Without traceability, Fair Trade coffee, wood that is certified as sustainably harvested by the Forest Stewardship Council or fish certified by the Marine Stewardship Council would not be possible. As more supply chains become transparent, consumers can decide to support companies that act more responsibly.
Posted: 20-Apr-2009; Updated: 06-Apr-2009
