Supply Chain Reporting

Yesterday Dell announced that they were going to join the Carbon Disclosure Project’s Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration. I happened to have been talking with Paul Dickinson about this at the GeSI board meeting last week, and I think that this a good idea.

As we have been saying in the past, alignment among the key players in the electronics supply chain is going to be critical for making deep progress. In particular, I’d like to see EICC (the group formerly known as Electronics Industry Code of Conduct) adopt this (or some variant) and standardize the specific info that will be requested of the electronics supply chain. (Note: this is my opinion, and may or may not reflect Sun’s official position within the EICC).

But this idea also highlights the need for OpenEco. If all of the thousands of organizations in Dell’s supply chain need to teach themselves about GHG emissions, or go hire expensive consultants, or buy a proprietary software package, this is going to be a costly endeavor. There’s nothing magic to reporting carbon emissions, and we need to all work together to make it as easy as possible. Hopefully OpenEco will help some companies get started (US now, other geos coming soon). The easier this gets, the more data will be surfaced, and the faster we’ll collectively figure out how to improve.