58% of consumers say they consciously consider sustainability when making purchases, according to PwC’s June 2021 Global Consumer Insights Pulse Survey. Most of the solutions those consumers want require coordination between companies that don’t naturally work together: a fashion brand and a recycling company, a grocery chain and a composting facility, a retailer and an environmental NGO.
Cross-industry partnerships produce sustainability outcomes that no single company can achieve alone, which is both the argument for them and the explanation for why they’re harder to build than in-industry collaborations.
Why Cross-Industry Works Better for Certain Problems
Some sustainability problems are systemic: they’re caused by the way an entire industry operates, and they can’t be solved by one company improving its own practices in isolation. Plastic packaging waste is the clearest example. A single retailer switching to recyclable packaging doesn’t solve the problem if the recycling infrastructure doesn’t exist to process it. Building that infrastructure requires collaboration between retailers, packaging manufacturers, municipal waste systems, and recycling processors: organizations that normally operate independently and have different financial incentives.
Patagonia and REI have led cross-industry collaboration with their manufacturing partners on environmental responsibility in shared supply chains, using tools like the Higg Index and the bluesign system to set shared standards. These standards work because multiple retailers adopt them, which means suppliers have one consistent standard to meet rather than dozens of slightly different retailer requirements.
The Fashion Pact (32 global fashion companies committed to shared environmental targets) is another example: no single signatory has enough supply chain influence to move the industry, but collectively they create enough demand for sustainable inputs to shift supplier economics.
NGO Partnerships: The Expertise and Credibility Exchange
Retailers entering sustainability programs often lack two things: technical expertise in environmental systems and public credibility. NGOs tend to have both, which makes them natural partners.
The value exchange in retailer-NGO partnerships: The retailer gets technical guidance on what environmental improvements are most impactful, independent verification that adds credibility to claims, and community relationships the company couldn’t build on its own. The NGO gets operational scale for conservation or environmental programs that grants alone can’t deliver, and a commercial funding model that’s more sustainable than donor dependence.
Starbucks’ partnership with Conservation International on coffee farmer sustainability is a long-running example. The collaboration produces verified sustainability outcomes and supplies the sourcing story that Starbucks’ brand narrative depends on. The financial incentive and the conservation incentive are aligned.
The best cross-industry partnerships don’t require anyone to act against their financial interest. They redesign the transaction so the financial interest and the sustainability interest are the same.
Technology as the Neutral Platform
One reason cross-industry collaboration is difficult is information sharing: companies that are competitors, or that don’t trust each other’s motivations, don’t willingly share data that could disadvantage them.
Pre-competitive data platforms (shared systems where multiple companies contribute data and receive industry benchmarks without exposing competitive information) solve this problem. The Sustainability Consortium’s THESIS system, the Carbon Disclosure Project’s Supply Chain Program, and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s circular economy network all operate on this model.
The Martine Jarlgaard / Provenance blockchain proof-of-concept (tracking a garment’s journey from farm to store through smart labels) is an early example of technology enabling cross-industry traceability that would otherwise require one party to trust another’s self-reporting.
P.S. If you’re building a cross-industry sustainability partnership, the most important early decision is governance: who makes decisions when partners’ interests diverge, and how is value shared when the partnership produces commercial benefits alongside environmental ones. Getting this structure right at the outset is harder than the sustainability work itself.