Crowdsourced website guides sustainable supply chains

Corporate sustainability professionals gained a new tool today in their efforts to mitigate the environmental impacts of supply chains with the launch of a crowdsourced web platform created by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).

The Supply Chain Solutions Center, developed by the EDF in collaboration with other nongovernmental organization (NGOs), is intended to target goals like consumer packaged goods (CPG) supply chains, which are responsible for over 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and two-thirds of tropical deforestation, EDF says.

New York-based EDF says the platform acts as a "Spotify" for Supply Chains, allowing users to create profiles and add case studies, expert advice, and other resources to help them put sustainability into action.The site's searchable interface offers templates for building sustainability plans and opportunities for connecting with NGO experts in six sustainability areas: agriculture, energy, chemicals, waste, forests, and freight.

Companies can also use the site to conduct an assessment to evaluate their sustainability efforts, find the most appropriate resources, and create tailored profiles that will suggest relevant content from verified contributors. These contributors include: Conservational International, Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, The Sustainability Consortium, ReFED, Field to Market: The Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture, Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council, and Further with Food. 

"Our goal is to make finding sustainability solutions as easy as finding a movie on Netflix or a song on Spotify," Elizabeth Sturcken, managing director of EDF+Business, said in a release. "Global supply chains can be massive and opaque, but when every node of the chain has a lighter footprint, the economic and environmental rewards are huge."