As an industry we all need to champion environmental and societal change, responsible business is now part of all our business strategy, and we all face pressures to be more sustainable, environmentally aware and support society.
Last month Scott Walker, our Procurement Director was joined by Darryl Brunt (Fellowes UK & Ireland Country Head), Isabelle Tarsh (Nestle, OOH’s Sustainability Lead) and Chris Jones (Regional Sales Manager from Menzies) to explore with Debbie Wall, our new Head of Responsible Business how we can all work together to understand and discuss what’s important to us all when it comes to driving sustainability and social value through the supply chain.
We took some time to identify the common themes and opportunities we are all experiencing and considered how we can work together, learn from each other, collaborate, and innovate to formulate ideas and find solutions for those harder to solve challenges. Throughout the discussion the key themes that came through were that we needed to collaborate more closely on finding solutions that reduce all our carbon emissions in an economic environment that is at best challenging. We acknowledged that we were all on a journey, be it at different points, but were all seeing the increased need to focus resource and leadership on providing more environmental and societal information to our customers, that is quantitative and qualitative and feedback the information that our customers give us to our suppliers.
Harder to quantify was if the current economic situation was going to affect the importance of the environment and society in purchasing decisions. The overall feeling was that while there will always be a focus on cost and value for money, this was no longer the only consideration and to be competitive equal focus now had to be given to the triple bottom line – the environment, society and sustainability.
