Following concerns about the dominance of an ‘instrumental’ logic in extant sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) scholarship, recent work has suggested the value of metaphor for enabling alternative perspectives on how supply chains can contribute to the global challenge of sustainable development. However, sustainability is not ‘just another’ management issue – it is identified as a moral, essentially contested and pervasive issue. Moreover, metaphors have been shown to be very powerful, with significant performative effects. Against this backdrop, this working paper explores the implications for responsible metaphor-use in SSCM. It tentatively proposes a procedural responsible metaphor-use in SSCM.