You know that unenviable feeling when it’s the guy you don’t like in the office’s birthday and the envelope for donations comes around, and you want to spit in it but instead you drop in a fiver so you don’t look bad?

Greenbang is wondering if that’s just how the likes of Dell, Hewlett Packard, L’Oreal, PepsiCo, and Reckitt Benckiser feel at the moment after signing up to assess the carbon emissions resulting from their supply chains.

The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a collaboration of over 315 institutional investors, including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Allianz and HSBC, with assets under management of more than $41 trillion, will be helping them with their enquiries after all the companies signed up to the Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration.

CDP is working with these global companies and their suppliers to create a single standardized approach to provide key climate change information throughout their supply chains.

Each member of the Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration has selected up to 50 suppliers to work with them and to respond to the CDP pilot information request in the first quarter of 2008. The results of the pilot will refine the process in preparation for the roll out and will help customers and suppliers to work together to develop strategies to reduce their carbon footprints. Some members will work with suppliers at national level, others will work internationally.

The project will be rolled out in May 2008, and CDP is inviting more companies to join the Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration. This will broaden both the geographical and sectoral scope – and potentially bring tens of thousands of new suppliers into the CDP process and extend disclosure globally. A report will be produced on the findings.

Paul Dickinson, CEO of CDP commented: “The Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration is a key step towards a unified business approach to climate change. By bringing together the purchasing authority of some of the largest companies in the world, CDP will encourage suppliers to measure and manage their greenhouse gas emissions. This will enable large companies to work towards managing their total carbon footprint, as the first step to reducing the total carbon footprint is to measure its size.”

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