Kicking the Tires on Your Carrots; Transparent Supply Chains for Everything
October 30, 2009
“Simply put: We believe that people have the right to know where things come from and what they are made of.”
This is the mission statement of life-cycle assessment startup, Sourcemap. Sourcemap measures the distance a product travels to a consumer’s hands, beginning with raw materials, ending with disposal, and including everything in between. The product’s impact is expressed as a CO2 footprint and displayed as lines on a map (see above). Sourcemap gathers its information from public sources, including the Okala guide, and makes educated assumptions about the rest.
By making supply chains transparent, projects like Sourcemap encourage a higher level of interaction with the products we buy. They also bring the environmental impact of supply chains to the consumer’s attention. The transportation of goods is something consumers take for granted, yet it is everywhere. The information provided by Sourcemap adds another variable to a consumer’s decision-making process. According to IBM, the average carrott travels over 1,500 miles to your dinner plate. Does this motivate you to buy carrots grown on a local farm? Maybe not. But if you knew that 1,500 miles equated to X cubic feet of CO2 emissions, then you might put the carrot down and rush to the farmer’s market. This is meaningful information that has the potential to create positive change in global supply chain management.
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