Being able to show your clients a responsible purchasing policy demonstrates a concrete and meaningful commitment to more sustainable production 🌱
According to the 2023 Agile Buyer report, social responsibility was a top purchasing priority for 15% of companies. This figure highlights the growing focus on social and environmental issues within procurement, a critical area for corporate sustainability strategies.
The resulting greenhouse gas emissions are often difficult to estimate due to complex supply chains and a lack of transparency in certain industries. Being able to present a responsible purchasing policy to clients is therefore a clear sign of a concrete and meaningful commitment to more sustainable production.
Before positioning itself as a driver of change in purchasing habits, a company must first do the internal work to clarify its objectives.
It is rarely possible to be perfect in every area. Companies need to identify the specific challenges within their sector and clearly define their values and ambitions.
Creating a materiality matrix* helps identify a company’s top priorities, particularly from the perspective of its stakeholders.
It helps to:
- prioritize the company’s goals
- ensure strategic and marketing alignment
*What is a materiality matrix?
A materiality matrix is a tool that helps companies identify their most important environmental, social, and ethical issues. To build one, a panel of internal stakeholders (HR, staff representatives, union members, etc.) and external stakeholders (suppliers, clients, partners, etc.) are surveyed about the company’s social responsibility. Analyzing these responses helps define the key priorities.
A purchasing policy sets the criteria that suppliers must meet before any contract is signed. The content of this document reflects the company’s level of maturity and its commitment to environmental issues, allowing suppliers to align themselves accordingly.
The Carbon Assessment is a method developed by ADEME to evaluate the emissions of an object, service, or company over a year. It accounts for a wide range of greenhouse gases and tallies all carbon emissions associated with the company.
The various roles of a Carbon Assessment:
- Providing an overview of the company’s greenhouse gas emission distribution
- Offering a foundation for any initiative aimed at reducing the company’s greenhouse gas emissions
- Establishing a way to track the company’s decarbonization goals
Every type of purchase carries specific economic, environmental, and/or social risks. It is important to map and analyze these risks to establish specific points of vigilance.
In the short term, this helps identify which suppliers are most aware of the risks within their sector.
In the long term, formalizing these risks helps prevent incidents that could jeopardize your supply chain.
Once your company's sustainable procurement policies are in place, the next step is to involve those most affected: your suppliers.
Signing a charter demonstrates your commitment to considering environmental issues when selecting suppliers. The charter clarifies your expectations and strengthens your relationship with your business partners.
Finally, the charter can serve as a tool to drive other objectives with your suppliers. It can act as a foundation for standardizing best practices or formalizing dispute resolution procedures.
An initial questionnaire provides a snapshot of your suppliers' current situation. The goal isn't to get a perfectly exhaustive result, but to help guide your ongoing dialogue with stakeholders.
The aim is to cover as many topics as possible: energy, biodiversity, soil pollution, waste management, mobility, governance, certifications, and goals. Sending this questionnaire regularly also helps track whether the company is truly committed to improving its impact.
Auditing your suppliers allows you to go beyond self-declarations and ensure that commitments are backed by real action. Many specialized independent auditing bodies can now verify your partners' management and production processes in advance.
Some partners are more important to audit than others.
To prioritize which partners to audit, consider the following criteria:
- The portion of your carbon footprint attributable to that supplier
- The share of your revenue generated with them
- The economic importance you hold for them: if you are their main client, they will be more attentive to your expectations
- The level of dialogue you have established
- Industry trends: companies lagging behind can leverage the decarbonization models of their competitors
- The cost of decarbonizing operations
In case of non-compliance: the goal of the assessment is to guide your suppliers so they can better meet your expectations. By supporting them through this change, you strengthen your partnership and align your entire value chain with a shared decarbonization strategy.
Of course, if you find that communication is difficult and your partner cannot meet your goals, you may want to consider switching suppliers.
To stay on track with decarbonization, purchasing habits must be constantly re-evaluated.
Before trying to reduce the impact of a product purchase, you need to question its necessity for the business. The best way to reduce the impact of a purchase is not to make it at all.
Two best practices can be adopted across the company to reduce purchasing volume without affecting employee productivity:
- Improve equipment management: shared access, identifying unused items, etc.
- Extend the lifespan of equipment: best practices, regular maintenance, repairing instead of replacing, etc.
Sourcing from many different suppliers can make a supply chain more reliable and less prone to failure. However, for non-critical purchases that don't threaten business operations, it is better to limit the number of product options and centralize management.
This approach helps to:
- Simplify stock management and replenishment
- Focus efforts and budget on finding reliable and sustainable sources
- Make it easier to implement new purchasing policies when things change
By limiting the number of product options, you avoid unnecessary purchases and focus on what the business truly needs.
For products that must be purchased, there are other ways to reduce their impact. Driven by the AGEC law, which requires public administrations to buy reused products, the market for these items is growing. You can now easily find furniture, IT equipment, office supplies, and even packaging. It’s also more cost-effective, as these products can be up to 70% cheaper.
Des prestataires proposent un service de collecte et de valorisation des déchets professionnels (bureaux, fauteuils ergonomiques, mobilier d’occasion…) en les intégrant dans un système de réemploi ou de recyclage.
These players operate in three ways:
- Reuse: an item is given a second life by being used again for its original purpose.
- Recycling: when an item becomes waste, it is completely transformed to be repurposed.
- Upcycling: involves taking an item and modifying it to give it a new function or purpose.
Some providers offer a quantitative report to help you measure the reduction in your environmental impact from your purchases.
The success of your sustainable purchasing policy largely depends on your employees' ability to grasp sustainability issues and drive a solid sustainable procurement strategy with your stakeholders.
Team-building workshops are fantastic tools for raising awareness among your employees about social or environmental issues.
The Climate Fresk is the gold standard for workshops on climate change. It focuses on the mechanisms of global warming, helping participants grasp the issue as a whole and fostering a collective awareness of the climate crisis.
Many other specific workshops and "fresks" also exist to dive deeper into certain topics, such as procurement-related issues with the Sustainable Buyer Fresk or the Sustainable Purchasing Fresk.
Training goes beyond simple awareness and allows employees to truly upskill.
With this in mind, some organizations offer training on sustainable purchasing strategies, primarily aimed at corporate procurement managers. Furthermore, integrating sustainable practices into daily routines allows all employees to benefit from the spread of best practices.
The challenge of procurement goes beyond the organization itself. Optimizing it and making it more sustainable is a major factor in securing the company's entire operation. It is also an excellent way to include the value chain in the company's CSR strategy.
Source:
Agile Buyer and CNA, "Trends and Priorities for Procurement Departments in 2023: Opportunistic Inflation, Real Relocation, and the Taiwan Risk," 2023.
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