Although there has been considerable effort placed on measuring supply chains in order to assess their performance, these techniques have been found to be time and cost focused, aimed at coping with rapid change. This approach tends to have a short‐term outlook. Work on greening supply chains is much longer‐term in outlook. Is information intensive and biased towards the supply side? These two mindsets appear to be diverging, developing in conflicting directions. This is an alarming prospect for the environment, which has no place in future supply chain performance measurements, thus running the risk of being increasingly side‐lined; and for performance measurements, which is unconcerned with longer‐term sustainability in terms of the environment. The case is made to amalgamate the advantages of both schools of thought to allow long‐term views to be represented by short‐term performance measurement.