Trucost Blog

Interest in sustainability has experienced exponential growth within academic institutions and GreenBiz.com has run a series of articles highlighting this including recently here Universities Commit to Billion-Dollar Energy Efficiency Investments. 

Such activities are increasing across university operations, developing educational curriculum to support booming demand for environmental course work and degrees, and increasingly also a focus on the environmental exposure of higher education organizations across their supply chains.

Highlighting this developing interest, this January, in perhaps a first of its kind event, Michigan State University is hosting a workshop for its suppliers and prospective suppliers to engage in a dialogue on partnering to reduce the environmental impacts throughout MSU's supply chain and individual suppliers, to identify the challenges and opportunities of assessing and improving environmental performance in the supply chain, and how collaboration can support mutual improvement.   On a video at the event's website, organizer Kathy Lindahl, Assistant VP of Finance and Operations for MSU calls the Understanding out Impact event an ‘new adventure for us... to come together to figure out how to reduce our environmental footprint together with our suppliers'.

This supplier workshop follows a March 2010 initiative where MSU in partnership with Trucost, examined the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the university's largest suppliers, and purchased food products to develop an understanding of the environmental footprint of suppliers and support supplier education and collaboration towards impact reduction.

This assessment comes at a time where the measurement and optimization of environmental risks and opportunities within organizational supply chains is rapidly maturing.  A number of recent developments, such as the October 4^th Launch of the Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Accounting and Reporting Standard for Greenhouse Gas emissions after almost 3 years of extensive stakeholder collaboration, and a growing number of companies encouraging and working with suppliers to improve environmental efficiency including 60+ road-testers for the draft Corporate Value Chain Standard.

It will be interesting to see what takeaways come from MSU's initiative, perhaps it will become a model for other higher education institutions, or companies for that matter, for educating and collaborating with suppliers towards greater understanding and reduction of environmental impacts.

More details about MSU's Understanding our Impact workshop is available at http://bespartangreen.msu.edu/conference.html.