GEMI Begins Development Of A New Tool, The GEMI Supply Chain Sustainability Tool

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI) has announced today that it is developing a new solution tool, the GEMI Supply Chain Sustainability Tool™ (SCS), which is focused on supply chain sustainability and the procurement decision making process.  The project will be supported by and conducted in partnership with the Northstar Initiative for Sustainable Enterprise (NiSE) at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota and the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan.

GEMI's Chair Neville Dias, Carnival Corporation & plc, stated, "I am pleased to announce that GEMI, is developing a new environmental sustainability tool, the GEMI Supply Chain Sustainability Tool™ (SCS) that will provide insight and support for both sustainability and purchasing professionals by linking market-oriented sustainability claims, economic input-output (EIO) and life-cycle assessment (LCA) results, and supply chain sustainability performance metrics."  

The new GEMI SCS™ Tool development is being led by Keith Miller, Corporate Sustainability Manager, 3M and Bill Gill, Assistant Vice President, Environmental Affairs, Smithfield Foods who will serve as co-chairs of the tool development process

"GEMI is expanding the information and learnings of GEMI's two existing supply chain sustainability solution tools, New Paths to Business Value (2001) and Forging New Links (2004) with a the new GEMI SCS™ tool that will enlighten and open a new, and much needed, degree of transparency deep into the supply chain using a practical and scalable platform." said Gill.  "This new tool will provide an actionable tool linking market-oriented sustainability indicators, claims and best practices (recycled content, recyclability, renewable content, substance free, etc.); scientifically based economic input-output (EIO) and life-cycle assessment LCA methodologies; and, supply chain operational metrics guiding effective sustainable procurement and sourcing," Gill added.

Miller stated, "The new GEMI SCS™ Tool will take advantage of a top-down 'hotspot' approach and bottom-up 'attributional LCA' approach to prioritize environmental aspects within a firm's supply chain while assessing the most relevant improvement opportunities of initially 3-5 commonly purchased product categories.  The tool will provide users with overall environmental impacts across sourced inputs – allowing for prioritization across procurement spend, based on user-specified weighting of impacts as well as decision support capabilities for assessing alternative purchasing scenarios based on trade-offs and efficiencies associated with user-specified decision variables," Miller added.

GEMI Solution Tools Chair, Steve Shedroff,  Global HS&E Data Systems Manager, The Procter & Gamble Company noted that "The tool will be a free interactive, web-based module, and include new functionality, which will help companies: prioritize supply chain  processes, identify opportunity indicators, model "hotspot" processes, and provide guidance toward "hotspot" reduction.  It provides a platform that can be expanded to include a wide range of product categories over time."

"GEMI is continuing its success and lessons learned from the development of the GEMI Local Water Tool™ last year where non-GEMI member companies are able to participate in the development of the tool as a Project Participants," said Gill.  "GEMI is pleased that the following companies have become GEMI SCS Project Participants: Andersen Corporation, Tenant Company and WW Grainger.  GEMI would welcome additional companies to join the project," Gill added.

"With the combined knowledge, insights and support of the GEMI member companies and SCS project participants, as well as the technical and development support of the Northstar Initiative for Sustainable Enterprise (NiSE) at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, and Climate Earth, the results of the completed GEMI SCS™ Tool will be an extraordinarily valuable publicly available  tool for use by many companies and organizations," Miller concluded.

GEMI members include: 3M; Abbott; Andersen Corporation; Ashland Inc.; Biogen Idec; BNSF Railway Company; Carnival Corporation & plc; ConAgra Foods; ConocoPhillips; ENI; FedEx; Halliburton; Johnson Controls, Inc.; Koch Industries; Kraft Foods Group Inc.; Legrand; Merck & Company, Inc.; Occidental Petroleum Corporation; Perdue Farms Incorporated; Phillips 66; The Procter & Gamble Company; The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company; Sealed Air Corporation; Smithfield Foods, Inc.; Southern Company; Tennant Company; Union Pacific Railroad; WW Grainger.

For more information about GEMI please visit GEMI's website at www.gemi.org and for more information about the joining this project, please contact us at [email protected]

For More Information Contact:
Amy Goldman, GEMI, 202-296-7449

SOURCE Global Environmental Management Initiative