Attending a conference on “greening” the supply chain probably sounds as exciting as a conference on, well, managing the supply chain.

Last week I attended a conference in NYC called The Ethical Sourcing Forum 2008. It was 2 days spent steeped in a set of important and exciting questions that companies increasingly will be compelled to address:

• How to maintain an environmental commitment (which first implies you have to have one) when 90% of your eco-footprint is from your supply chain?
• What will happen to brand reputations when consumers wake up to the ethical, moral and environmental impact of outsourcing? (Big questions for a company like Coke, for instance, that has 70% of it’s value tied up in its brand).
• If you have an environmental message that really matters (and many companies are trying to do radical things in this terrain; many aren’t doing nearly enough) how do you break through the greenwash and natural consumer cynicism?

A leading issue in the conversations-mainly from the buyers and global procurement managers-was around the importance of transparency. Transparency with their often vast, global and complex supply partners. For example, Starbucks has 100 buyers in 3 countries procuring everything from coffee to tiles, from paper cups to lawn care services. No matter what stuff you’re after, the challenge is the same: How to achieve a trusted, reliable and consistent information stream so you can avoid the dreaded lead in toys or poison in pet food conundrum. How can you compel your suppliers to own the impacts of their processes? This is something that WalMart is taking a lead on with their Scorecard initiative which strives to achieve a 5% reduction in packaging from their own thousands of suppliers by 2013. The sleeping giant is waking.

The issue that intrigued me and which I challenged us to talk about was the fact that this desire for transparency exists on the consumer side of the equation as well. Obviously it’s not as pressing-now-but increasingly we see people wanting to know: “Where does all my stuff actually come from?” In large part, this explains the popularity of shows like The Discovery Channels “How It’s Made” where you can find out how everyday items are made-from fire extinguishers to diatonic accordions to doughnuts. So it’s only natural that buyers of stuff will start to become fascinated with the source of that stuff. That people will start to look a little farther upstream. And if that stream is “dirty,” that’s a problem.

Smart companies are not only acknowledging this interest, but creating clever ways to let us in. To tell us their own “Story of Stuff.” Check out what Patagonia is doing with their mini-site, The Footprint Chronicles or Dole’s innovative RFID capability that let’s you tap a 3 digit number from their banana stickers onto their website to see just which farm in Ecuador your organic banana came from before you pop it into your smoothie. This doesn’t even address the myriad of certification organizations jockeying to be the credible conveyors of that “sourcing” information such as: The Carbon Trust, Utz Certified, or The Rainforest Alliance. Know of other interesting examples? Let me know.

A more transparent supply chain-for both companies and consumers-has a lot of potentially great implications. And companies who can demonstrate a clean green supply chain will, I believe, gain more of a competitive advantage. Afterall, as they say, knowledge is power.