Our stakeholders expect the highest standards of economic, social and environmental performance in our work. To enable us to achieve this, we are working to embed ethical and sustainable considerations into our purchasing decisions.
We are preparing our supply chain for a more sustainable future, identifying potential sustainability risks, acting on emerging legislation, and responding to evolving best practice and innovation in this area.
Our sustainable procurement programme
This year we expanded our programme beyond the seven key materials that were the focus of our sustainable procurement work in 2009/10, taking a wider approach to assessing opportunities for responsible sourcing. In June 2010, we began working with our partner Action Sustainability to implement a comprehensive sustainable procurement programme.
This started with defining what we mean by sustainability for our materials, products and services. To do this we undertook a ‘heat-mapping’ exercise to understand and prioritise our key risks and opportunities across everything we procure from steel and timber to fleet vehicles and labour. Workshops were held with our procurement managers to define sustainable options for their categories covering ethical, social, environmental and whole lifecycle risks and opportunities.
For example, in the timber category ethics was considered a priority as a result of the heat-mapping exercise. You can read about what we are now doing on ethical timber sourcing and our membership of WWF’s Global Forest and Trade Network on page 25 of this report.
Commitment from the top
A cross-functional steering group was established to give direction to our sustainable procurement programme. This group, which met four times in 2010/11, is chaired by our Director of Contracts and Procurement. The group agrees the programme of sustainable procurement work and monitors its progress, providing challenge where necessary.
Benchmarking ourselves
Buyers and contract managers from across our business contributed to a good practice benchmarking exercise (the ‘Flexible Framework’). This was the first year of self-assessment and we achieved a relatively low score, but the exercise highlighted opportunities in our procurement process for future improvements. There is still work to do on establishing the big wins for the business and we need to work with our stakeholders to achieve this.
A key opportunity identified was to train procurement staff in sustainable purchasing, so training and coaching was rolled out to over 40 procurement staff. This training empowers them to embed sustainability into decision making, and helps them manage contractual incentives to reward sustainable performance throughout our supply chain. We have also developed sustainable procurement tools and guidance to support our procurement teams.
Working with suppliers
We have achieved a few early wins through our sustainable procurement programme. For example, in 2010/11 we tendered the contract for waste management at our managed stations, so we included contractual incentives rewarding sustainability.
Since the new contract came into force in November 2010, we have worked with the contractor to increase diversion from landfill at the stations where they manage our waste. We achieved an increase of 6.3 per cent in the final quarter of the 2010/11 reporting year, diverting a total of 31.6 per cent of waste from landfill at these stations. For more information on our approach to managing waste please see the link on the right.
In 2010/11, we also revised the guidance for our purchase of office supplies, so that the vast majority of office paper (A4 and A3 size) purchased from May 2011 will have a recycled content of 75 per cent
As well as working with suppliers we have also been seeking further opportunities to work with partners in our supply chain. We have spoken about our sustainable procurement programme at relevant forums in 2010/11 including the Rail Industry Association seminar on sustainable development and the Action Sustainability Annual Conference.