In an earlier blog, I mentioned that I was going to present at the European Conference of the Supply Chain Council, which I did by now. The presentation preceding mine was on sustainability and I really looked forward to it as I was looking for understanding how well HP's efforts were stacking up in our quest to develop a more sustainable world.

I have to tell you I came out of the presentation with mixed feelings. Not that HP is doing badly, but because the speaker was rather cynically putting a whole number of things back in question. For example, when companies calculate their carbon footprint, do they take everything into account, do they look at methane emissions and converts those to CO2 equivalents, are they not taken for a ride when they go for a carbon offset program etc. Scientifically he may and probably is right. However, I would argue that the importance today is to have companies gain conscience of the issues and start addressing them. Being scientifically 100% correct will come, but let's learn to crawl before we walk, and walk before we run.

One of the examples he was giving, was the fact that Walker Crisps had carbon labeled their chip bags in the UK. He showed a bag with a logo saying 75 gram of CO2 had been emitted in the manufacturing of this bag of chips. He put in question whether everything had been counted, and whether 75 gram was correct.

Interestingly I have heard a presentation from the project manager from Walker in another conference a while ago. He recognized that this was their best assumption, but more importantly that, because of the fact they had done this exercise, the R&D department was now hard at work to reduce the number to something in the area of 15 gram. They knew how to do that already and were performing the tests.

This is where my argument comes back in. Whether 75 gram and 15 gram can be proven scientifically and whether they include every single emission is one thing, but more importantly today is the fact that Walker Crisp believe they can reduce the CO2 emissions for this product by 80%.

I would argue we need to do two things in parallel, reduce the emissions, and any mechanism to motivate our companies to do so is valuable, while in the background we improve our models and measurement mechanisms. My fear is that if we disguard the initiatives taken by companies today, we will not get anything done. And that would be disastrous for our planet.