Green procurement set to become the norm
Food for thought – good news for those producing sustainable solutions
Experts reveal public and private sector procurement professionals are increasingly willing to demand suppliers fall into line with green best practices by James Murray, BusinessGreen, 16 Mar 2010
Suppliers to the public and private sector will see their competitiveness diminish over the next few years if they fail to provide customers with information on their carbon footprint and evidence that they are improving their environmental sustainability.
That is the stark warning from a group of procurement experts speaking at a roundtable event hosted yesterday by the Carbon Trust Standard, who predicted that the number of organisations adopting demanding sustainable procurement criteria will only increase.
The trend is particularly apparent within the public sector, where the launch 18 months ago of a Centre of Expertise in Sustainable Procurement within the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) has led to an overhaul of government procurement policies.
“Two years ago we were failing [with regards to sustainable procurement] and we were severely criticised for that,” revealed Fiona Ross, director of the new Centre of Expertise. “Now we are completely transformed and on track to exceed our sustainable procurement targets.”
Ross said that sustainable procurement had become a key component of civil service procurement training courses and revealed the government is working with its key suppliers to develop a voluntary charter that will commit them to embracing best practices surrounding the carbon resource efficiency of their products, as well as their youth employment policies and support for smaller businesses within their supply chain.
The OGC is also working with the Carbon Disclosure Project initiative to co-ordinate carbon information requests for public sector suppliers to ensure they only receive one request for carbon data from government, rather than the same request for numerous departments.
Ross said that suppliers would increasingly have to meet minimum sustainability standards to secure government business, noting that Defra’s new Government Buying Standards were already ensuring that public sector bodies purchase products that have secured a “green tick” of approval from the department.
Similar trends are apparent in the private sector, where retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Tesco have made high-profile commitments to cut carbon emissions across their supply chain and environmental criteria are an increasingly common feature of tender documents.
Brian Pembroke, quality and supplier development manager at paint manufacturer AkzoNobel, said the company had a sustainable supplier policy in place and that the procurement team’s success was measured in part on how many suppliers it can get to sign up to that policy. He added that such an approach was increasingly becoming the norm across the industry.
“We are seeing a repeat of what happened with quality assurance, where companies started off with an aspiration to improve quality and now have very controlled and organised processes for managing quality assurance,” he said.
There is little excuse for suppliers not to measure their carbon emissions and embrace efforts to curb them, according to Helen Alder, product development specialist for the Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply (CIPS), who argued that almost all the environmental measures being requested by corporate and public sector procurement teams delivered either an immediate or short-term payback for the supplier, primarily through the energy bill savings that are associated with cutting carbon.
Sustainable procurement policies have in the past been hampered by what Jeremy Willis, head of procurement at PricewaterhouseCoopers, described as a difficulty in knowing whether to trust suppliers’ competing environmental claims.
However, he noted that the emergence of credible new environmental standards in recent years such as the Carbon Trust Standard, which requires firms to measure and reduce their carbon footprint year on year, was making it easier for companies to ensure their suppliers are making good on environmental pledges.
He added that there was an increasingly robust case for suppliers to embrace the environmental best practices that their largest customers are calling for. “Suppliers can now get the accreditation that their customers want and if they are doing it properly, they are taking cost out of their business as well,” he said.
