And, just as evidence that this is a real butterfly … even McKinsey has an essay on the birth of a consumer movement in their “Socially Conscious Consumer” posting! That means this is real! With information (data!) consumers will naturally move from products whose provenance they cannot confirm or for which it is known that slavery is involved in the supply chain AND move to products that can prove they are ethical.
But, the problem still exists. So, to make the full effect requires more butterflies!
If you are a company with a large consumer base – think Walmart or Marks and Spencer or Proctor and Gamble or your favorite tech products company – this will cause change (or at least concern and then change!) And, if your product relies on some of these minerals or other materials for its functionality it is a strong encouragement to look for both responsible sources or alternative materials. In an earlier posting reference was made to a BCG-MIT Sloan Business School study about business cases for sustainability. The top motivation indicated in a business survey was improved brand reputation … next was increased competitive advantage. Butterflies work!
These butterflies could be helped a lot by data. Transparency, linking back to the social impacts, labor practices/slavery, the influences mentioned at the start of this posting, is the key. Big data may help. But, the data most needed is that which is in this case most hard to come by.
So, we come back to the question posed at the start of this post … what is “your butterfly” up to? Or, perhaps more correctly stated, can you get some butterflies “fired up”? There are lots of opportunities. These influences will need to be included in our view of “circular economies.” We will need more and better data to tell us the whole story. Or, if the data is available, a better sense of how we need to analyze this data and use it to tell the rest of the story.
Maybe this should be one of our top New Year’s resolutions.
David Dornfeld is the Will C. Hall Family Chair in Engineering in Mechanical Engineering at University of California Berkeley. He leads the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability (LMAS), and he writes the Green Manufacturing blog. This article was republished with permission from David Dornfeld.
