Procure and Supply

Sustainable Procurement Wheel

Our Sustainable Procurement Wheel helps companies to embed sustainability across their procurement and supply chain practices.

Based on research with leading companies, 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 and the outer wheel looks at broader practices supporting change.

Getting Started on Incorporating Sustainability into Public Procurement

Public sector organisations have an opportunity, and an obligation, to ensure that the goods and services they buy align with their environmental and social commitments. This guide helps public procurement professionals to integrate sustainability considerations into public procurement processes and to improve the sustainability outcomes of their buying decisions.

Addressing Scope 3: A Start Here Guide

A guide for leaders of companies of all sizes to understand the basics of Scope 3 emissions and how companies should begin to take credible action. The guidance is anchored in the real-world experience of companies that are already navigating this journey.

Collaborating for Value Chain Decarbonisation

With the urgent need to reduce global emissions, rapid decarbonisation of our economy is essential, and the key is collaboration across the value chain. Our new guide provides practical advice and examples to help companies support their supply chain partners to decarbonise.

You'll find advice on how companies are prompting, influencing, supporting, and investing in their value chain and resources and ideas for how to support six key decarbonisation pathways: renewable energy adoption; energy efficiency and conservation; logistics; materials stewardship and waste; lower-impact agriculture and land-use; and carbon removal.

Sustainable Procurement: A Tip Sheet for SMEs

Companies are recognizing that the goods and services they buy contribute to their environmental and social footprint, often quite significantly. This tip sheet focuses on helping you to improve the sustainability outcomes of your company’s buying decisions and improve the impact your company has on the environment and on communities.

Advancing Water Stewardship Through Supplier Collaboration

This guide, created in collaboration with WWF and AstraZeneca, can help you to advance credible water action by addressing material impacts on water across your full value chain. The guide identifies potential pathways for cooperation with suppliers, and groups them into five categories: operational enhancements, financial activation, advocacy engagement, industry alignment, and procurement incentivisation. Each pathway includes specific actions to engage suppliers and explains their potential benefits. This practical resource will be most useful to supply chain management and sustainability professionals.

Supply Chain Sustainability: A Practical Guide to Continuous Improvement

This guide from the UN Global Compact and BSR outlines practical steps that your company can take to achieve supply chain sustainability. This resource provides a wide array of introductory information to better acquaint you with sustainable procurement, such as developing the business case; establishing a vision and expectations for your supply chain; explaining the key aspects of engagement with suppliers; and determining roles and responsibilities. The step-based guide also includes helpful examples that highlight best practices.

A Guide to Traceability: A Practical Approach to Advance Sustainability in Global Supply Chains

Traceability is an important part of developing a sustainable value chain. Part II of this guide from the UN Global Compact can help you to familiarise yourself with the three main approaches to traceability: Product Segregation, Mass Balance, and Book and Claim. Part III offers practical guidance on implementing traceability. The guide also includes an annex that lists the most relevant traceability issues and actors for ten common commodities.

Ethical and Sustainable Procurement

Ethical and responsible procurement has become an environmental, economic, and reputational imperative, and yet organizations continue to face broad and significant challenges when translating awareness to action. This report from the Chartered Institute of Purchasing Supplies (CIPS) was created to address that gap. The report includes key concepts and provides practical guidance on the procurement cycle, including identifying vulnerability and risk, evaluating and shortlisting suppliers, and updating ethical procurement programs. It also contains useful practical information that will help you to communicate with suppliers from other regions in the world - particularly in areas with acute social and cultural differences.

Future-Fit Action Guide: Procurement safeguards the pursuit of future-fitness

This action guide from Future-Fit offers specific guidance on how to reduce - and potentially eliminate - the negative impacts that your procurement strategy, practices, and goal may be having on the surrounding systems on which it depends. This guide will help you to understand what a future-fit procurement goal looks like; how to get started in pursuing future-fitness; how to assess to your progress within the appropriate context; and how to provide assurance through effective and detailed disclosure.

Climate Nexus Report: Climate + Supply Chain, the Business Case for Action

Modern supply chains, with their global geographical reach and specialized inputs, are especially vulnerable to disruption from climate change. This report from We Mean Business and BSR will help supply chain, procurement, and purchasing professionals to better understand the importance of how climate change and supply chains intersect, and builds a business case for taking action to drive resilience within your company. The report acknowledges the primary objectives of supply chain managements, identifies the business impacts of climate change on supply chains, and offers recommendations for change.

Sustainable Procurement Toolkit

This free, open-source workbook from Sustainability Advantage includes tools that will support procurement specialists with selecting the most sustainable suppliers and the most sustainable products. This resource is a good starting point for companies shifting towards responsible sourcing, and includes a Request for Proposal (RFP) specifications template, a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) tool, and a Bid Evaluation tool.

Purchasing the Future You Want

This purchasing guide from HP provides a good template for how you can leverage sustainability procurement to advance your sustainability goals. It provides a summary of the relationship between sustainable procurement and meeting the Sustainable Development Goals; the aspirational model of the circular economy ecosystem; and the benefits HP has experienced in aligning its sustainability goals with supply chain impact.

Procurement specialists and sustainability change agents will particularly benefit from the guide’s evaluative criteria on designing products for circularity and on supplier transparency and performance. Although the content focuses on information technology, the principles and scope can be extended to apply in other procurement areas.

Extending ESG Best Practices Into the Supply Chain

This white paper from Avetta is a good starting point for junior change agents and procurement specialists to understand the growing importance of sustainable supply chains. It will help you to understand how investors are adjusting their focus to sustainable supply chains and why, and it explores emergent best practices from established leaders.

Tracking Progress in the Supply Chain

This report by Quantis is designed to help you track real changes in your supply chain’s sustainability performance, beyond methodological or scope changes. It covers when to recalculate your base-year emissions, how to avoid double counting emissions reductions, identifying the data you need, collecting and make use of primary data, and how to manage data uncertainty. This resource will be most useful to supply chain and sustainability practitioners.

ImportYeti

This comprehensive database uses Bills of Lading to visualise virtually every part of a company’s international supply chain. This is a good place to start if you want to identify the suppliers of partners, competitors, and peers.

Respecting Human Rights in Your Supply Chain: A Tip Sheet for SMEs

Every company, including a small or mid-sized enterprise (SME), has an obligation to respect human rights. This includes when you are buying goods and services. This guide explains how to assess possible human rights impacts in your supply chain and steps your company can take to prevent or mitigate them.

The Buyer Code

The Buyer Code provides model language for setting out the steps that purchasers can take towards supporting positive human rights outcomes. It promotes the shared-responsibility approach of the UNGPs and the OECD Guidance on Due Diligence for Responsible Business Conduct, and articulates detailed standards that fall under six categories: institutional commitments; selecting suppliers; negotiating the contract; performing and renewing the contract; remediation for human rights harms; and disengagement and responsible exit.

Commercial Contracts and Sourcing

This brief from Re:Structure Lab can help you to better understand how irresponsible purchasing practices are key drivers of forced labour in global supply chains. The brief explains how contracts and sourcing practices can change to promote equitable labour practices and protect supply chain workers from exploitation. It also highlights sourcing tools and agreements that promote decent work and explains the far-reaching reforms required to enable workers to hold business accountable for the terms and conditions within their contracts.

Tackling Modern Slavery in Supply Chains

Slavery exists in all stages of procurement, and as supply chains grow and become more complex, it becomes increasingly challenging to ensure freedom, fairness, and safety in the workplace. This resource will help those who want concrete guidance on how to reduce or eliminate the risk of modern slavery occurring in their supply chains. This guide explores effective standards, risk assessments, audits, corrective measures, and practical advice for engaging with suppliers, as well as a comprehensive collection of relevant tools.

Best Practice Series to Eliminate Child Labor in Global Supply Chains

GoodWeave is a team of business-minded social change experts and advocates who are dedicated to ending child labor, forced labor, and bonded labor in global supply chains. Their platform and resources will help you to better understand the issue of child labor in global supply chains and to take meaningful, regimented action that addresses the root causes of child labor. We especially recommend their Best Practice Briefs, which will help you to address effective standard setting; perform inspection and monitoring; map out your deep supply chain; engage in effective remediation; and prevent future abuses.

The Supply Chain Solutions Center

Launched by the Environmental Defense Fund, the Supply Chain Solutions Center is a “crowdsourced” knowledge resource hub. The library’s current focus is on agriculture, energy, chemicals, waste, forests, and freight, and provides sustainability resources, best practices, case studies, reports, executive interviews, strategy templates, webcasts, and news that will support you in learning about these issues, assessing risk, setting goals, measuring, and reporting. The Solutions Center also brings together sustainability and supply chain professionals, creating a space where platform users can connect and collaborate with other experts.

Engagement for Supply Chain Sustainability

Pressure from the public and stakeholders is driving companies to creatively and proactively engage with their supply chains to reduce risk, leverage opportunities, and address sustainability challenges. Unfortunately, many of the frameworks designed to support companies with these efforts push company-supplier collaboration as a de facto ideal, despite how incompletely this captures the complexity of actual company-supplier relations.

Developed as a joint effort between the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and the Embedding Project, this guide can help corporate procurement and supply chain professionals to better understand how supplier engagement spans a spectrum from more collaborative to more coordinated; reflect on their existing supplier engagement approach(es); identify the approach(es) best suited for addressing relevant sustainability issues; and learn how to leverage engagement for the benefit of supply chain sustainability.

Procuring a Regenerative Economy: The Critical Role of Sourcing in Generating The Future We Want

Written specifically for Chief Procurement Officers and other sourcing professionals, this paper from Volans will help you to understand the action needed to enable and support a regenerative economy through conscientious procurement. This paper explains the urgent need for a shift towards regenerative procurement, and identifies leading-edge sustainability-related terminology. It also provides case studies of emergent examples of regenerative approaches to procurement.

Managing ESG Risk in the Supply Chains of Private Companies and Assets

Businesses are increasingly expected to understand and manage their exposure to supply chain risks. As public awareness grows on supply chain issues, companies face increased scrutiny to take action on sustainability topics with suppliers. PRI created this guide to help investors take early, practical steps towards assessing and managing both internal and external supply chain risks. The guide provides illustrative case studies that will help you understand why ESG factors in the supply chain are important and how your company can engage with supply chain partners to manage risk.

Responsible Minerals Assurance Process: Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) Standard for Mineral Supply Chains

Developed by the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI), this resource was created to improve traceability and responsibility along the mineral supply chain. The resource will help mineral supply companies to address environmental, social, OH&S standards, and governance concerns, as well as to navigate and integrate existing relevant frameworks. The standard has been benchmarked against - and is consistent with - the RMI’s Risk Readiness Assessment and the Responsible Business Alliance's (RBA) Validated Assessment Process (VAP), as well as nineteen other prominent international ESG standards.

Circular Innovation Council: Circular Procurement

This platform was created by the Circular Innovation Council to support Canada’s collective understanding of the circular economy and how purchasing advances it. It showcases a broad range of resources that may be especially helpful for sustainability practitioners and leaders working in Canada, such as case studies from a variety of sectors and industries; guidance and best practices; policies and frameworks; and purchasing tools.

Although created for the Canadian context, many of the learning materials here provide lessons and insights that are equally applicable elsewhere.

A Practical Guide to Insetting

Insetting refers to a company offsetting its emissions through projects that avoid, reduce, or sequester carbon within its own value chain. It is an opportunity for businesses to link emissions and carbon sequestration to their sourcing landscapes. This guide from the International Platform for Insetting shares insights and provides recommendations that will help you to transform your supply chain for a resilient, regenerative, net zero carbon future that values and protects nature. The guide was created specifically for insetting practitioners and stakeholders that want to learn more about the concept, and it highlights lessons and opportunities for realising the full potential of insetting.