Do-it-yourself carbon calculations

Apparently, executives who need to measure a supply chain's carbon footprint would rather figure out how to do it themselves than use off-the-shelf software to do the job. A survey of 500 supply chain executives conducted by eyefortransport, a conference producer and research firm, found that many are using homegrown software to measure their companies' carbon footprints.

Although software vendors have unveiled applications for calculating a supply chain's carbon footprint—the amount of greenhouse gases emitted during manufacturing, warehousing, and transportation—45 percent of the respondents said they had no plans to buy such tools. Moreover, 16 percent said that they would use internal systems to gauge their carbon footprint.

That was surprising, said Katharine O'Reilly, eyefortransport's senior vice president of environmental research. "With the diversity of off-the-shelf technologies recently introduced, we expected more adoption of some of the best-of-breed solutions. What we're finding instead are homegrown solutions and a large percentage of companies who are still shopping for the right product for their needs."

Respondents may be shunning commercially available software, but they still care about their carbon footprints: 73 percent said that "green" issues would be important for their companies over the next three years.

[Source: eyefortransport, "Green Transportation & Logistics" Survey, July 2008]