by Michael Connor
Procter & Gamble – a company that says its brands “touch the lives of people” four billion times each day – said it had launched an environmental sustainability scorecard and rating process for its about 400 of its key suppliers in 30 countries.
The scorecard, which will be introduced starting this month, will assess suppliers’ environmental footprint and “encourage continued improvement by measuring energy use, water use, waste disposal and greenhouse gas emissions on a year-to-year basis,” P&G said.
The 400 key suppliers will be required to use the scorecard “but if an individual supplier is not able to do it because of their capabilities, it will not impact them negatively” in the first year of the program, said a P&G spokeswoman. Roll-out beyond P&G’s key suppliers will be determined based on experience in the first year of the process, she added.
“In the future, P&G will use the scorecard to determine each supplier’s sustainability rating as part of P&G’s annual supplier performance measurement process,” the company said. P&G currently spends $43.8 billion annually with about 75,000 suppliers around the globe.
P&G also said it hoped that work done in developing the scorecard might lay the foundation for an industry standard. The scorecard will be “open code” for use by any organization to help promote a working discussion and determine common supply chain evaluation processes across all industries, P&G said.
P&G said the supplier scorecard was developed in collaboration with a supplier sustainability board which includes more than 20 leading supplier representatives from P&G’s global supply chain. The scorecard is specifically designed to focus on, and encourage, year-on-year improvement – “regardless of a supplier’s total size or the current stage of its sustainability program.”