What: Coresight explores the challenges retailers could face in improving sustainability in sourcing and how they can resolve them.

Why it is important: As the global pandemic shed light on the weak points in current retail supply chains, they are being revamped. These supply chain make overs should also include making these operations more sustainable.

The Covid pandemic exposed many weaknesses of supply chains and has prompted many companies to restructure various aspects of the supply chain. During this restructuring, companies should consider the tradeoff between costs and sustainability in their new strategies and implement initiatives that produce more environmentally friendly results.

There are many areas of retail supply chain that present opportunities for greening- spanning, pre-production, production packaging, storage, and distribution. Retailers should look to adopt 3D sampling and digital design, implement specific environmental conservation practices for their suppliers, use eco-friendly packaging, implement stricter audits for the use of space in packages, reduce energy use and rethink their sourcing destination mix and transport options.

The challenges of greening supply chains include a lack of visibility into supplier infrastructure and subcontractors, varying sustainability standards between sectors, conflicts between sustainability and procurement strategies, and pressure on supply chains through trade disputes. But collaboration and participation between stakeholders across multiple industries could lead reduce overall impact.

Sustainability in sourcing: greening supply chains is more critical now than ever before