2Sustain

Taking a page from Walmart’s playbook, the Procter & Gamble Company has launched a supplier environmental sustainability scorecard and rating process to measure and improve the environmental performance of its key suppliers.

The new scorecard is the result of 18 months of close collaboration with P&G’s Supplier Sustainability Board, which includes more than 20 leading supplier representatives from the company’s global  supplier network.  It will assess suppliers’ environmental impact and encourage continued improvement by measuring energy use, water use, waste disposal and greenhouse gas emissions on a year-to-year basis.

It’s worth noting that P&G also took the additional step of making the scorecard “open code,” so that any interested organization can use it. According to a press release, that’s all part the company’s effort to create an initiative that can have far reaching cross-industry impact. In fact, P&G is encouraging its suppliers to use the scorecard within their own supply chains.

Initially, P&G is rolling out the scorecard only to 400, or so, key suppliers in its network of about 75,000. Suppliers will have a full year to prepare to report their data before the rating can adversely impact their supplier rating with P&G. After that, 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 launch of the Supplier Environmental Sustainability Scorecard represents the next step in P&G’s commitment to environmental sustainability and reflects the Company’s holistic, end-to-end supply chain strategy,” says P&G Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer Bob McDonald.  “We will grow P&G’s business by touching and improving more consumers’ lives in more parts of the world….more completely. To accomplish this, we must continually innovate and grow responsibly and sustainably. Keeping Sustainability at the core of our business fuels innovation and strengthens our results.”

I have posted before about P&G’s sustainability efforts (see here and here), and it’s great to see that the company is now focusing on its supply chain as a key component in its drive toward more sustainable practices. I also applaud P&G for making the new scorecard open code –which will help promote transparency and collaboration throughout the entire industry.

P&G’s downloadable open code environmental sustainability supplier scorecard is available at: http://www.pgsupplier.com/environmental-sustainability-scorecard.