On this episode of Net-Zero Carbon, Tyler Cole, director of carbon intelligence at FreightWaves, chats with Zsofia Agnes Nagy, supply chain adviser at BZLW Consulting, about how to turn sustainability goals into action along supply chains.
Nagy consults mostly small and medium-size enterprises on making their supply chains more sustainable. Sometimes “it’s a struggle,” she said.
Some people at older companies are skeptical about sustainability and see it as a passing trend, whereas younger generations are more eager to implement strategies based on environmental and social impacts.
“If you just think about some of the basic processes in the supply chain and how much you can help the environment and those people that work in your supply chain and your collaborators, … you can do a lot without even proclaiming the sustainability project,” Nagy said.
Many companies don’t collect enough data or invest in the right systems to put sustainability into action, Nagy noted. On the operational side, companies can see rapid results if they put sustainable practices in place. “It starts really with small actions,” she said.
Read: Data: Driver for reducing emissions in freight — Net-Zero Carbon
“We’re not pursuing the right targets, and because of that, we haven’t educated our workforce on how they can start pursuing supply chain sustainability,” Cole said. “I look forward to increasing standards because that will also solve the other problem you mentioned, which is data aggregation.”
Different data-gathering methods and systems collect different types of data to varying degrees of granularity.
The first step in making a supply chain more sustainable is understanding how it works and getting visibility along the entire process, Nagy said. If a company cannot provide that information, it’s much more difficult to implement sustainability strategies.
The two discussed how several environmental, social and governance metrics such as minimizing waste and improving efficiency have been around forever and provide benefits to the company as well as to the environment or communities.
“We need to get to another ground of morality from a business perspective where we can see the overall picture where we don’t only follow the money, but we follow the long-term actions,” Nagy said. “I do believe that companies can make this profitable for themselves.”
Young people see that “their future is being jeopardized,” and they are “banging down the door” to create sustainable supply chains in new and existing companies, Nagy said.
View all of FreightWaves’ Net-Zero Carbon episodes and sustainability stories.
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