Wednesday 6 February 2019

Businesses cut 633m tonnes of CO2 from supply chains

The world's biggest businesses have cut 633 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from their supply chains.

That's according to a new report by CDP, which suggests this has lead to collective cost savings of $19.3 billion (£14.9bn).

The climate disclosure programme shows supply chain emissions are generally 5.5 times larger than a company’s direct operations.

It shows in 2018, 115 organisations with a joint purchasing power of $3.3 trillion (£2.5tn) requested environmental information from more than 5,500 of their key suppliers - this is up from just 14 organisations a decade ago.

Nearly three-quarters of 27 major purchasers said they are either already deselecting or considering deselecting existing suppliers based on their poor environmental performance.

In addition, 63% are either currently using or considering using data from CDP disclosures to influence whether they sign deals with suppliers or not - this compares to figures of 4% and 9% respectively ten years ago.

Sonya Bhonsle, Global Head of Supply Chain at CDP, said: “In the ten years that we have been working with purchasing organisations we have seen a fundamental shift in expectations around business action on sustainability.

"Leading purchasers are using disclosure to push positive change down the supply chain, with data playing an increasingly important role in their decision-making.