We should have Open Supply Chains. Can we?
Posted by Cian O'Donovan on the 21st of August, 2008 at 7:24 pm under economics, environment and sustainability. This post has one comment.
Tom Raftery at GreenMonk talks about the new (US) EPA programme, SmartWay, which is aimed at bigging up companies who cut down on product transport emissions. I particularly like one phrase:
You are only as Green as your supply chain after all!
Exactly. And for those who have been through and now do organic and clean energy as standard, supply chain cleanliness is a logical next step. Telling the world about it is even more logical.
This has pretty wide applications. Food, from fresh produce to produced supermarket meals. Clothes, including production conditions and textile sources . All aspects of technology production, energy consumption and distribution.
I’m picturing a scenario where I open my nicely new matt-finished iPhone box. Inside it has some fancy Apple packaging that includes the line “Designed by Apple in California.” And then “Produced and distributed on behalf of Apple at http://tinyAppleURL/34512″
Click the URL and get a full breakdown of labour, materials and distribution for YOUR individual iPhone.
Is this possible? Of course it is.
I carry in my pocket two mobile devices every day. Both have GPS and cellular triangulation just in case I go kill someone and the feds need to hunt me down. I’ve got an Oyster card that uses some sort of RFID magic to open the doors of Transport for London for me on the days I’m not on a bike. So the tracking technology is already in my pocket and probably yours. Crucially it’s also already on the scanning codes that big logistic enterprises use. Tie this in with a network of energy, textile, labour and component databases and we start to paint a pretty vivid picture of the history of pretty much any goods sold in the West. So the logistic technology is there to start tracking. Tie all the above into a carbon reporting database and we start getting a true picture of the actual cost of your new iPhone.
That’s the theory anyway. Is there anybody working on this right now? And what are the implications for companies that do this? Are there really that many profit making or even seeking corporations who will be willing to put their necks on such a transparent line?
Last word to Tom Raftery:
