How leading companies, NGOs and solution providers are working to address the myriad issues that can arise in any supply chain.
This week, Tiffany & Co. released its sixth annual Sustainability Report, which outlines the jeweler’s continued progress in corporate social responsibility, commitment to the environment, and contributions to the communities across 30+ countries in which it operates. “Of the many reasons to take pride in Tiffany, none is more important than our long-held commitment to the environment and its people,” said Tiffany CEO Frederic Cumenal. “World-class leadership in sustainability among great luxury brands is rooted in a humble understanding of our impact on, and thus responsibility to, the world.”
Among the latest news in responsible food sourcing: The Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games will have the largest sustainable seafood offering to date of any Olympic or Paralympic Games; McDonald’s announced developments collectively impacting nearly half of its food menu in the United States; and Subway has enhanced its commitments for local sourcing of produce and other products.
The food industry widely recognizes a looming mountain it must climb: By 2050, the world population will grow by more than 2 billion, which will require upward of a 70 percent increase in food production. Along with this rise in demand, companies in the food supply chain face increasing scrutiny on the environmental and social impacts of farm operations. Here’s the fundamental challenge: increasing production while preempting regulations and minimizing environmental impact.
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) announced today it will be consulting stakeholders on a number of options aimed at providing the market with greater assurance that MSC-certified fisheries and supply chain companies meet internationally accepted norms for labor practices. “The MSC Board recognizes the increasing importance placed on social issues when considering sustainability,” said Werner Kiene, chairman of the Board. “As a result the MSC Board has resolved to enhance the MSC sustainability certification scheme for wild fisheries by introducing a risk-based approach that assures stakeholders that labor practices throughout the MSC-certified supply chain, from ocean to consumer, meet internationally accepted norms.”
In the south of Spain, unsustainable water use is threatening Doñana National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of Europe’s most important wetlands. Located southwest of Seville, the Park supports millions of migratory birds and is a stronghold of the endangered Iberian lynx.
Since the “Detox My Fashion” campaign launched in 2011, 76 fashion brands, retailers and suppliers have committed to remove toxic chemicals from their supply chains by 2020, accounting for a combined 15 percent of global textile production.
It was something of a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ kind of week in the ongoing quest for sustainable sourcing of palm oil — potentially the most prolific and embattled ingredient in the consumer goods industry. First, five multinationals active in Singapore — Unilever, Danone, Ayam Brand, IKEA and Wildlife Reserves Singapore — came together this week to drive an increase in the amount of sustainable palm oil sourced in the country, with the goal of delivering products that have not contributed to haze pollution or deforestation to consumers.
Supply Chain Transparency: The Challenge Enough has been said about the importance of transparent supply chains. Today, it is unacceptable for a global brand to ignore fair labor practices. Yet, labor violations continue to occur around the world daily. For example, most Bangladeshi apparel employees work 14-16 hours a day, seven days a week for extremely low wages. In Cambodia, the ILO reports that one in five women say sexual harassment led to a threatening work environment.
New research commissioned by Oxfam shows that rice, soy beans, corn, wheat and palm oil together lead to more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than any country’s individual footprint, with the exception of emissions giants China and the United States.
Today, Fairphone announced it is adding conflict-free tungsten from Rwanda into its supply chain. With this achievement, Fairphone has successfully managed to transparently source all four of the conflict minerals (tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold). Fairphone began in 2010 as a campaign to increase awareness for the use of conflict minerals in consumer electronics. Six years later, the social enterprise has released two smartphones and more than 100,000 Fairphone owners have joined the movement, but this cause is more relevant than ever.
More sustainable cotton has become more widely available thanks to collaborations such as the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) and other programs focused on minimizing the use of highly hazardous pesticides, improving working conditions, addressing biodiversity issues, and reducing water consumption in cotton agriculture.
When it comes to developing sustainability programs, most brands begin by adding: by introducing “green” practices to their workplace or a recycling component to their manufacturing process. But to truly have impact, sustainability practitioners should create purpose that is built-in, not bolted-on, across both business and brand strategy. How do we shift from bolting on sustainability to building it into the business? And what inspires this shift in the first place? To truly build in sustainability, we must look at the back-end of product creation: the supply chain.
What could be a dry technical presentation on supply chain metrics is immediately derailed, as presenter Scot Case, Training Developer for the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council (SPLC), elects to depart from the predetermined slide show, and instead deliver the content in a workshop-style format. So much for a nice, easy-to-write post.
As a creative guy sitting between the manager of recycling for a major retailer and a supply chain expert for a large clothing brand, I certainly feel like I am bringing the knife to the metrics gunfight in this session. But the sheer corporate heft The Sustainability Consortium (TSC) carries makes learning more about its systems and metrics pretty important for anyone working in the field. TSC CEO Sheila Bonini starts us off with an introduction to the staggering impacts of consumer goods: they are linked to more than 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, some two thirds of deforestation and 75 percent of forced and child labor issues.
NGO Rainforest Action Network (RAN) claims it has found many Japanese companies are either “systematically misreporting compliance” under Japan’s Corporate Governance Code, or have a “fundamental lack of understanding as to what constitutes meaningful sustainability reporting and stakeholder engagement.”
NIKE, Inc. has unveiled the latest expansion of its European Logistics Campus in Belgium, to accelerate its drive toward “the supply chain of the future.” The expansion will make Nike’s European operations more efficient, more responsive and more sustainable, enabling growth by serving consumers across Nike.com, Nike retail and wholesale partners in 38 countries, all from a single inventory location.
BSCI (Business Social Compliance Initiative) and Sedex have been competitors in the past, but this week, the business-driven initiative and non-profit organization signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to reduce duplication of effort while building capacity and bolstering global collaboration to fight human trafficking. The announcement comes as both organizations release new online tools for their memberships.
Leading seafood brands, major UK retail chains and some of the world’s largest fishing companies have struck a groundbreaking deal to protect a key Arctic region from industrial fishing for cod.
Canadian forest-conservation NGO Canopy has announced six new brand partnerships in its successful CanopyStyle initiative, through which more than 65 major fashion brands, designers and retailers have pledged to end the use of ancient and endangered forests in their rayon supply chains. Viscose and rayon fibers are made from wood pulp and are some of the most widely used in clothing and textiles, threatening endangered forests. Approximately 120 million trees are logged annually for fabrics and about a third of them are sourced from ancient and/or endangered forests.
According to the USDA, consumer demand for organic foods has grown by double-digits every year since the 1990s — but organic acreage has not kept up. Today, only about one percent of US farmland is organic and farmers looking to transition to organic face real barriers, including shouldering financial uncertainty during the three year transition period required to be eligible for USDA Organic certification.