Sustainability management solutions provider Optera and retail network SPS Commerce have announced the launch of the Retail Sustainability Collective, a new solution aimed at enabling retailers to measure and reduce supply chain emissions by streamlining emissions data sharing from suppliers

According to Optera, the new initiative comes as retail organizations are facing increasing pressure to address their environmental impact, and their supply chain emissions in particular, with supply chain emissions averaging more than 11 times operational emissions, based on CDP data. While corporations are increasingly committed to supply chain sustainability, with nearly 70% actively working to help suppliers decarbonize, the path to progress is hindered by fragmented data and organizational silos, the company added, with the lack of primary data on supply chain emissions a prime reason.

Without primary data, retailers cannot build plans for decarbonization, let alone achieve real outcomes. By combining its expertise in supply chain emissions management with SPS Commerce’s two decades of experience in retailer-supplier data exchange, the Retail Sustainability Collective offers a unified approach that benefits both retailers and suppliers, Optera said.

Tim Weiss, CEO and co-founder of Optera, said:

“For too long, sustainability teams have been going it alone, often in a siloed function trying to build separate, and sometimes duplicate, processes and programs from scratch. The Retail Sustainability Collective will enable sustainability teams to tap into existing networks and processes within their organizations – streamlining emissions management and making it a core part of business operations.”

Optera said that the Collective would provide benefits for both suppliers and retailers.

Key features for retailers include comprehensive primary data coverage across the supply chain, support and methodology for supplier outreach, education, and response validation, enhanced collaboration between sustainability and supply chain teams, more accurate and complete reporting and greater ability to achieve emissions reduction targets.

For suppliers, the solution aims to address the multiple disparate ESG surveys from each of their retail customers, providing a streamlined, single submission process for sharing emissions data with multiple retail customers, built-in calculation tools and resources that accommodate all levels of sustainability maturity, and benchmarking insights to understand performance relative to peers.

Scott Williams, Senior Manager, Product Management at SPS Commerce, said:

“These challenges aren’t unique to emissions data. We’ve been helping retailers and suppliers face these same kinds of visibility and data collection challenges for decades across all sorts of supply chain datasets.”