The Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council (SPLC) has unveiled a set of five essential principles that it asserts defines leadership in sustainable purchasing. By providing a common reference point for sustainability excellence, the Principles enable greater alignment and benchmarking of sustainable purchasing efforts across all types of organizations operating in the multi-trillion-dollar institutional purchasing marketplace.
The SPLC says the Principles also serve as a “moral compass” as it also launches the development of a multi-sector program for guiding, benchmarking and recognizing leadership in sustainable purchasing.
The Council believes these Principles will help the institutional purchasing community achieve its full transformative potential, in much the same way that the UN Principles for Responsible Investment have helped investors to catalyze large-scale market transformation. The development of a shared definition for leadership in sustainable purchasing can similarly enable efficient sharing of best practices, solutions, training, benchmarking, recognition, and policy efforts among organizations, sectors and regions.
“The Council supports a strategic approach to sustainable purchasing that is consistent across sectors,” says executive director Jason Pearson. “The potential for alignment, market influence and supply chain innovation accelerate dramatically when we all speak the same language and use similar processes to evaluate and mitigate the impacts associated with institutional purchasing.”
- The five essential principles for leadership in sustainable purchasing
- How to put the principles into action at your organization
- How suppliers can support customers’ implementation of these principles
- How the principles can be useful to advocates for social and environmental responsibility
- How the principles serve as a foundation for the development of a multi-sector guidance, benchmarking and recognition program for leadership in sustainable purchasing
“Lockheed Martin has been actively engaging both our procurement staffs and our suppliers towards a process very similar to the one outlined by the SPLC’s Principles,” said Dan Pleshko, VP for Aeronautics Quality Transformation at Lockheed Martin, and panelist during the Principles launch webinar. “We are experiencing how this process can allow us to more efficiently, effectively and strategically make progress toward our sustainability goals than we otherwise would have.”
The Council says the Principles were developed through an 18-month multi-stakeholder process that engaged leading organizations from a number of sectors, and included the collection of more than 300 comments via public forums and a comment period. The final iteration of the Principles reflects the deliberation of a Technical Advisory Group (TAG) made up of SPLC members from the purchaser, supplier and public interest advocacy communities.
Get the latest insights, trends, and innovations to help position yourself at the forefront of sustainable business leadership—delivered straight to your inbox.
Published May 7, 2014 3pm EDT / 12pm PDT / 8pm BST / 9pm CEST