For the past several years, supply chain leaders have been operating in near-constant crisis mode. Disruptions have forced companies to rethink sourcing, inventory, transportation and network design, often with one primary goal: making the supply chain more resilient.

At the same time, sustainability has slipped somewhat from the center of the conversation. A few years ago, it was one of the dominant topics in supply chain strategy. Today, AI has largely taken its place. Companies are understandably focused on how AI will change their operations and worried about falling behind competitors that adopt it faster.

But sustainability and resilience should not be treated as competing priorities. In many cases, the same decisions that make a supply chain more efficient can also make it less wasteful and ultimately more sustainable.

That connection starts with something very simple -- waste.

In our personal lives, efficiency often means avoiding waste. We plan the fastest route to work because we do not want to waste time. We try not to buy more food than we can eat because throwing it away wastes both food and money. The same principle applies to supply chains, even if putting it into practice across a global network is far more complicated.

Better forecasting, for example, can help a company more closely align production with actual demand. Producing the right amount of product means less excess inventory, less storage, fewer unnecessary movements and potentially less product that ultimately needs to be discarded. Optimization may begin as a cost or efficiency initiative, but reducing waste can also produce environmental benefits.

This is one area where AI may actually help bring the two priorities together. AI itself raises legitimate sustainability questions because of the energy and resources required to support it. Yet the same technology can help companies forecast more accurately and optimize complex supply chain decisions. The challenge is recognizing both sides of that equation rather than assuming every technological improvement is automatically a sustainable one.

The Circular Supply Chain Gets More Complicated

Another important piece of the sustainability discussion is circularity.

Consumer expectations are changing, particularly in areas such as food, beverage and retail. People are paying more attention to packaging, plastics and where products come from. Circular systems are already familiar to many consumers. Beverage bottles and crates, for example, can be returned for reuse or recycling rather than simply discarded. The packaging moves back through the system so it can be used again.

That sounds simple. Operationally, it is not.

Circularity requires reverse logistics. Products or packaging have to be collected, transported, sorted, cleaned and sometimes reconditioned. All of that adds cost and complexity. A company therefore needs a real business case for creating a circular system rather than treating circularity as an environmental slogan.

This is where regulation can become an important factor. In the European Union, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation began in August 2026, establishing new requirements intended to reduce packaging waste and increase recycling, reuse, refill and collection. The regulation includes measures to expand deposit-and-return systems and requirements designed to make packaging easier to reuse or recover.

For supply chain leaders, regulations like these turn circularity from an environmental ambition into an operational consideration. Companies need to think about how packaging will be collected, transported, sorted and returned to circulation, and how to build those additional flows into the supply chain efficiently enough that they do not create unnecessary cost.

Transportation offers another example, in Spain, Barcelona’s Low Emission Zone restricts higher-emitting vehicles from operating within a designated area during weekday hours, with restrictions that have been extended over time to include certain vans and trucks. For retailers, distributors, hotels, restaurants and other businesses moving goods into urban areas, rules like these can influence fleet decisions, delivery models and network design.

Companies may need to consider lower-emission vehicles or different distribution strategies, not simply because those options are cheaper today, but because regulation is changing the environment in which their supply chains operate.

Sustainability Still Has to Make Business Sense

This is perhaps the uncomfortable part of the sustainability conversation. Doing the environmentally preferable thing is not always the least expensive option.

Businesses need to operate within that reality. Reverse logistics costs money. New vehicles cost money. Reconditioning packaging costs money. Sustainable materials may cost more. Companies cannot simply ignore those economics.

But that does not mean sustainability should be pushed aside whenever another supply chain risk emerges.

Instead, companies should look for the places where resilience, efficiency and sustainability naturally overlap. Reducing unnecessary transportation is one example. Better forecasting is another. Avoiding overproduction, making smarter use of materials and designing networks that eliminate unnecessary movements can all improve the economics of the supply chain while reducing waste.

There is also a role for consumers in this discussion. We often expect companies to make sustainable choices while being less consistent about accepting the same trade-offs ourselves. We want less packaging, but we also want convenience. We may say we prefer locally produced food, then buy something that has traveled thousands of miles because we want it regardless of season. We want lower emissions but may not want to pay more for the alternatives.

That tension matters because supply chains ultimately respond to demand. Consumer behavior, business economics and regulation all influence what companies prioritize.

The goal, then, should not be to build a “sustainable supply chain” separate from the resilient or efficient one. It should be to design a better supply chain.

That means asking where waste can be eliminated, where resources can be reused, where forecasting can become more accurate and where transportation and network decisions can accomplish more with less. Sustainability will not always be the cheapest path, and resilience will sometimes require redundancy. There will be trade-offs.

But efficiency and sustainability are not natural enemies. At their best, both are asking the same fundamental question, “How can we get more value from the resources we already have while wasting less along the way?”

That is a question supply chain leaders cannot afford to stop asking.