A More Sustainable Supply Chain: Step One

For many businesses, the biggest problem with adopting sustainable practices is getting started. Sometimes, what a manager needs most of all to get started is to notice something he or she has missed so far.

In Small Changes Can Drive Big Impacts in Greening Fleets, Marc Gunther tells the story of just such a manager:

When Chris McKenna, who manages a fleet of trucks for Poland Spring, learned that the company’s drivers were racking up as much as 1,400 hours a month of idle time, he saw an opportunity to make a difference. Running truck engines in winter kept the cabs warm — the company is based in Maine — but it cost Poland Spring money and polluted the air.

Read the post. McKenna made a small change and yielded far-from-small results. Maybe your company can, too.

And if you want to learn more about greening transportation in your supply chain, see MIT Sloan Management Review’s recent