Resources to Get Started on Sustainable Procurement and Supply Chains

For many companies, some of their greatest sustainability impacts reside within their value chain. Embedding sustainability across your procurement lifecycle from sourcing and procurement; through your supply chain, production, logistics, and customer use and recovery can feel overwhelming. In this blog, we share our Sustainable Procurement Wheel that contains a curated set of resources to help you understand the portfolio of practices that you can employ, reflect on your own maturity, and identify opportunities to drive positive change.

Companies large and small are recognizing that the goods and services they buy contribute to their environmental and social footprint, often quite significantly. This is true whether it is your direct spend for the raw materials, components, and resources used to create your final products or services or your indirect procurement of the goods and services that support your operations such as office supplies, software, and cleaning services. Either way, integrating sustainability considerations into your company’s purchasing decisions can help you to improve the impact your company has on the environment, on workers, and in communities.

To help your company to embed sustainability across its procurement and supply chain functions, we spoke with over 200 Chief Procurement Officers, category managers, and other supply chain and procurement professionals, we reviewed over 1000 resources, and partnered with an amazing global set of SPP Ambassadors to identify practices, examples, and resources. Based on this research, we have identified key practices and curated a selection of the most relevant resources and tools to help you implement them.

The inner wheel follows the procurement lifecycle: Plan, Select, Award, Manage.

Our conversations with those working at the leading edge of sustainable procurement globally have stressed the need to move beyond the traditional procurement approach of placing demands on suppliers enforced through contract conditions. While these can be levers for action, they can also push the burden onto your value chain partners. Instead of simply mandating action, think about how you can collaborate with value chain partners by offering support and bringing tangible resources to the table.

The outer wheel looks at broader practices supporting change: Building a deeper Understanding of your value chain and potential sustainability impacts; Setting strategy by evaluating risks, prioritising where to act, and developing goals and targets, Aligning roles, policies and processes; Investing in your team; Providing solutions for the business; Collaborating externally to support innovation, shape industry norms, and advocate for change; and Tracking and disclosing your progress.

To learn more, visit https://embeddingproject.org/procurement-wheel/ where you can see the full wheel and click on a pathway or practice. In each case, we provide guidance on how to get started, case studies, and key resources. We continue to update this tool so please share it with your networks and contact us if you have good cases or resources that you think we should add.