DEEPTI’S RESEARCH DISPATCH
How Can We Know We’re Buying Sustainable Products?
Supply Chain Transparency: Research Tidbit #5.
Unlike food, most other products (like office chairs, clothes, electronics, and household goods) don’t come with ingredient lists.
And ingredients aren’t the only factor in whether a product is sustainable, since ingredients are just the materials that actually made it into the product.
The ingredient list doesn’t account for the processes by which materials were shipped, the energy used in manufacturing, or the byproducts and wastes produced as a consequence. All of these other factors are part of the ‘supply chain’.
Not being able to make informed decisions about products is a serious obstacle, if you want to influence the economy toward ethical practices.
While looking for a word to describe my frustration, I came across the term ‘supply chain transparency’ and this article from Harvard Business Review that gave me a good summary of the concept. I added a deeper look at it to the research project I’m doing this quarter .
What I knew going in
I was familiar with the concept of supply chains because they’ve been a focus of my interest for a while.
