EMC recently announced that we are one of the sponsors of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Product and Supply Chain Initiative. What this is about is figuring out a standard method for assessing the greenhouse gas emissions that occur throughout the lifecycle of a product -- including its manufacture, use, and disposal. A press release is a tough place to explain why it's so important, so I thought I'd tackle that here.

Need to Know

First and foremost, we have to understand the upstream (supply chain) and downstream (use and disposal) impacts of our products.  Though we can't control how our customers use our products, we do estimate that on the whole, electricity from EMC's "products in use" (to borrow a phrase from Kevin Moss of BT) are responsible for three to four times the emissions as our own internal operations; twice that if you factor in cooling and power losses. But we really don't have a good handle on the upstream, or supply chain, side.

EMC, like many of our peers, does not do "manufacturing" per se. We conduct reliability, performance, and failure testing, system assembly, and system test and verification. Material extraction, preparation and component manufacturing are performed by our suppliers. Factor in the number of components in a Symmetrix array, for example, as well as the number of suppliers, and it's a good bet that the upstream emissions are also many times that of our internal operations. As an industry, a significant part of our impact is in the supply chain.  We need to understand that so we can focus our creativity on alternative approaches.

Need to Do

We also care about how the measurements are done. As I was quoted in the press release, the protocol needs to be "practical and actionable." We don't want to end up with methods that are so granular and precise that 95 percent of our effort goes into perhaps doubling the accuracy while giving us no really new insights into where the reductions need to place. That would not only be a waste, but a shame when those dollars and hours could have gone into re-engineering the processes.

We would probably need that level of detail if we were going to compete via "embedded carbon" labels on our products. But that doesn't make sense in our industry -- especially the B2B side. Our supply chains are so convoluted and intertwined that it's hard to see how individual product impacts could be teased out in a way that actually shows differentiation. No offense to the beverage industry, but what works for a bottle of water is not going to work for a CLARiiON array. Besides, we have plenty to compete on when it comes to energy efficiency in the data center -- and that's what hits our customers in the pocketbook and the carbon footprint.

[Just as an aside, wouldn't it be interesting to take a few industries, and for each draw a single map displaying the top 10 vendors and their connections with all of their suppliers? I'm guessing there would be some pretty substantial differences between the consumer goods map and the IT map. Can you say "spaghetti diagram"?]

Materiality

Oh, and this is a bit of a hoot. Our announcement -- focusing on Products and Supply Chain -- got picked up in the media with the headline "EMC saves earth from its own private jets." As reported in our Carbon Disclosure, use of our jets accounts for just about 1.3 percent of our operational (scope 1 and 2) emissions. It's under 5 percent of emissions from employee travel. And conservatively, given everything above, about 0.1 percent (yes, zero-point-one percent) of our product-related scope 3 emissions.  It's kind of like plugging a drafty window when the doors are open and the front wall is missing; a good idea, but maybe not top priority.

Companies are labeled as "greenwashing" when they try to focus attention on something that's showy but not substantially impactful. The principle is called "materiality."  Maybe the press should be held to its own standard...

Kathrin Winkler is senior director of Corporate Sustainability at EMC Corporation.