Sustainable procurement means making sure your supply chain has the most positive impact it can. Although you cannot control the impact of goods and services made by other firms, you can try to do business with those that match your values and intentions.
Organisations that try to make their supply chains sustainable often look at things like ethical labour standards, circular waste management, shipping miles and carbon emissions.
These need to be balanced against considerations like value for money and convenience. Building a sustainable supply chain is a long and challenging process. It is sometimes referred to as trying to balance people, profit and the planet.
Your onwards supply chain – that is, how your products and services are used by other organisations – is also part of your scope 3 emissions. So building a sustainable supply chain can also include looking at waste management for your own goods once your clients have used them.
If you are examining your scope 3 emissions as part of your carbon footprint, then your supply chain is at the core of this work. Your supply chain counts for an average of 88% of your business’s total carbon footprint. If you plan to join a regulatory standard, then it may require you to show that you have taken steps to make your supply chain more sustainable.
A sustainable supply chain also makes your business more resilient against shocks, simplifies EU trade and can make you more attractive when bidding for work with large organisations. Many retail consumers increasingly value sustainably-made products, which can command a premium and benefit your bottom line.
Your supply chain is unique to you. If you want to make it more sustainable, you first have to understand what it is. Your first step should be to map out where you source materials from and where your products go to. You might want to treat these – your ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ chains – as separate exercises.
For your downstream chain, you can explore how your products are disposed of once used. From there, you might find solutions to reuse or recycle them. For your upstream supply chain, you can see whether any of your existing suppliers are members of a sustainable trademark like a B Corp.
Depending on your sector, you might exist in a complex web of suppliers and be unable to exactly source the provenance of all your materials. Or you may be reliant on a small number of suppliers for niche materials. So your next steps are likely to be unique to you.
There are lots of guides, toolkits and resources that you can use to explore how to make your supply chain more sustainable.
We’d love to help. Our dedicated Business Sustainability Managers can advise you on where to start and point you to other resources and organisations that might be right for your business.
