Most companies that want to improve their supply chain sustainability face the same problem: they don’t have the data. Not about which product categories have the most environmental impact, not about how they compare to competitors, and not about which interventions would actually move the needle. The Sustainability Consortium exists specifically to solve that problem.
TSC is a global nonprofit with over 90 member organizations, among the world’s largest consumer goods companies, alongside nonprofits and government organizations, that have collectively developed science-based tools for measuring and improving product sustainability across 130 categories.
What THESIS Actually Does
TSC’s signature initiative is THESIS: the Sustainability Insight System. THESIS rates products across nearly 130 categories according to environmental and social hotspots: packaging, animal welfare, deforestation, water use, labor practices, and chemical safety, among others. Each hotspot is assigned Key Performance Indicators based on scientific research, which allows companies to benchmark their performance against industry standards and identify where their highest-impact improvement opportunities are.
The value of this isn’t philosophical. It’s operational. A retailer who knows that tissue paper’s primary hotspot is fiber sourcing (FSC-certified vs. virgin forest) and that its secondary hotspot is chlorine-free bleaching has a clear supplier specification to work with. Without that data, sustainable sourcing decisions are guesswork.
TSC collaborates with Walmart and other major retailers to apply THESIS across their supply chains, helping them set supplier requirements that are grounded in science rather than intuition, and measuring whether those requirements are producing actual improvement.
The Value of a Pre-Competitive Network
One of the more unusual aspects of TSC’s model is that it operates as what the organization calls a “pre-competitive” forum. Member companies share data and research on sustainability challenges without competitive concern, because the shared goal, creating measurement tools that the whole industry can use, benefits all participants regardless of their competitive position relative to each other.
This model produces results that no individual company could achieve alone. A single retailer auditing its packaging sustainability across 5,000 SKUs with proprietary methodology produces data that helps only that retailer. The same work done by 90+ companies using a shared methodology produces industry benchmarks that improve everyone’s decision-making.
The Innovation Program, launched in 2017, extends this logic to active problem-solving: diverse stakeholders collaborate on sustainability challenges too large for any one organization to address. More than 60 projects launched in 2022 across sustainability topics and sectors.
The biggest barrier to supply chain sustainability isn’t willingness — it’s data. Most companies genuinely don’t know where their highest-impact problems are. TSC exists to solve that problem at industry scale.
What Retailers Can Use From TSC
For retailers, the most practical TSC resources are the THESIS category scorecards and the associated Sustainability Measurement and Reporting System (SMRS). These give specific, science-based guidance on what to measure and how to communicate sustainability claims that are verifiable rather than aspirational.
The MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium connection, through which TSC’s data and network support MIT-funded research, means that the most rigorous sustainability science being produced in academic settings gets translated into practical business tools. Twenty seed projects with $5 million in aggregate funding have already launched through this channel.
For smaller retailers who can’t afford TSC membership: the public resources on their website (category-level sustainability research, performance indicator frameworks, and guidance documents) are freely available and represent the most defensible external standard for communicating supply chain sustainability claims to customers and regulators.
To learn more, visit their website.
P.S. The Sustainability Consortium’s THESIS database covers product categories you probably haven’t audited yet. It’s worth checking which of your top-selling categories have documented sustainability hotspots before your next supplier review cycle.