The following is an excerpt from an op-ed by Justin Floyd, CEO of RedCloud posted in ESG Today Portal. Read the full version here.
sustainable packaging, carbon offset credits and compliance reporting. They appoint Chief Sustainability Officers to measure progress and publish annual updates.
These efforts matter. But they often overlook a systemic failure that undermines many sustainability initiatives at once.
Every year, an estimated $3 trillion of fast-moving consumer goods is wasted globally. That is not just spoilage. It is excess production, expired inventory, write-offs and forced discounting embedded into the system by design. This level of waste represents a material environmental and social cost that is increasingly difficult to justify as a normal cost of doing business.
Global trade is running on an operating system that hasn’t changed since the 1970s.
The root cause of this waste is guesswork.
For decades, the world’s largest manufacturers have been flying blind. A brand produces a million units of detergent or soft drinks. They ship them to a distributor. The distributor ships them to a wholesaler. The wholesaler sells them to a retailer. At every step of that journey, visibility is lost.
Read the rest of the opinion piece here.
