April 12, 2012, Stanford Camplus, Palo Alto, CA — Blu Skye's Glen Low will be speaking at this year's Berkeley-Stanford Cleantech Conference on a panel about how clean tech is playing a role in improving the efficiency and reducing the impacts of global supply chains.

For most retailers, the sustainability journey begins on the operations side of the business – with a focus on what they can directly control - the environmental footprint of stores, distribution centers, and logistics – and covering a range of eco-efficiency issues including energy, waste and water. And this makes perfect sense as the place to start. However, for most retailers the footprint of their operations is a relatively small slice of the overall footprint – 10-20 percent. The lion’s share of the impact of retail is in what goes on the shelf – the products and the impacts along the supply chain of extracting or harvesting raw materials, processing and manufacturing, transport and packaging, and consumer use and end of life. And having an impact on that 80-90% of the retail footprint very quickly demands collaboration with suppliers to understand impacts all along the value chain and to identify and pursue innovation opportunities to reduce that footprint.