So you want your supply chain to adopt sustainable and green practices: how complicated could that be?

Abstract This chapter provides an overview of the strategic tensions involved in persuading a supply chain to adopt sustainable practices, with a particular emphasis on the apparel industry and green chemistry. These tensions arise from the conflict between a firm's potential desire to use sustainable practices to improve its competitive positioning (e.g., by creating a brand that is uniquely the greenest brand on the market) and the reality that adopting sustainable practices (e.g., green chemistry) will require the firm to cooperate with its supply chain and potentially with competitors in ways that may undercut the opportunity for an enhanced competitive position (e.g., if everyone adopts the same green practices, it is difficult for any individual firm to claim it is uniquely the greenest firm). To some extent, this tension can be overcome by cooperation in ways that expand the market overall (e.g., take sales away from substitute products), while striving for competitive advantage against direct competitors (i.e., collectively this concept is called coopetition, which is described in the last section).