Once upon a time, businesses' supply chains were a quiet backwater of commercial life. This is no longer the case. Over the past few decades, supply chains have been transformed by enterprise resource planning and specialist supply-chain software. Now, the rapid recognition of the need for action on carbon emissions is leaving its footprint firmly on these distribution networks, too.
With progressive and far-sighted companies already advanced in their actions to identify and reduce their own carbon emissions, attention is switching to those firms they rely upon for products and components. And in this area, one of the most remarkable achievements of the carbon-reduction effort is in establishing a duty of care for carbon emissions through a supply chain that most businesses do not own or have full legal responsibility for.
The extents to which this can go can be startling. Chocolate-maker Cadbury-Schweppes, for example, is working to find ways of reducing carbon dioxide produced by cows ruminating in dairy farmers' fields, after recognising that this accounts for 70pc of the carbon footprint of a bar of its core Dairy Milk brand. Similarly, Walkers Crisps, the snacks group owned by US giant PepsiCo, has been working with farmers to reduce the emissions of the tractors that tend and harvest the crops of potatoes used in its products.
