Practices and Policies
Quick wins from simple changes. Firstly, ensure that you have policies that reflect good ESG & sustainability practices such as:
- Diversity and Inclusion. Beyond just equal opportunities and anti-discrimination, your business can really widen the available talent pool and increase the range of perspectives to your benefit. This simple 5 point summary from Harvard Business Review is a neat aide memoire. Employee Resource Groups and similar actions can really drive engagement.
- Recycling and Waste Management. With the impact of plastics on the environment and the huge hidden waste in food to landfill, ensuring you have simple policies and practices in this area reduces your own impact. Understand your local programs and vendor options, and check out these simple tips from Earth Day.
- Data and Insights. Your chosen ESG & sustainability priorities could come from a wide array of topics (emissions, water, minerals, inclusion, data privacy…) tailored to your business. The ability to get correct, timely and complete ESG & sustainability data from across your business and your suppliers, vendors, customers and counterparties (i.e. your ‘value chain’) is critical
Purchasing
With the right data & insights (see above), your business can leverage your existing spend to ensure your vendors and suppliers are on mission with you.
Embedding ESG & sustainability criteria and data gathering in your procurement approach (digitally rather than manually) will ensure:
- You understand and value vendor ESG & sustainability credentials
- You align and benefit from vendors with suitable policies and practices
- Ethical sourcing (e.g. fair trade, conflict-free)
- Inclusive vendors (e.g. minority owned, social enterprises)
- Sustainable practices (e.g. green powered, reforestation, biodiversity)
- You find delivery vendors to execute on specific topics such as:
- Green energy
- Recycling and waste management
- Data security
- Energy efficiency
- Building certification
A specialist ESG & sustainability partner like Veritrove can provide a strategic and digital approach.
Products
Providing product options that truly speak to your customer needs. Testing your markets purchasing and price preferences around sustainable products can be a great way to look before you leap.
Are your customers willing to increase purchasing volume or price with regard to:
- The sustainability of your packaging
- The sustainability of your materials and components
- The sustainability of your service or use case
Many organizations are now promoting and benefiting from sustainable or inclusive product offerings, such as Grove (household products), Impossible (foods), Latitude (diamonds), Bombas (clothing) and even Dell (electronic devices).
Promotions
So your brand has done the hard work on sustainability and ESG matters and wants to ensure that its customers, prospects, investors and regulators understand the progress and wins.
Avoiding ‘greenwashing’ (positive messages not supported by actions) is important for brand credibility.
That said, messages can be at the organization or product or campaign level.
While CDSB, UNSDG, IIRC, VRF, SASB, ISSB, TCFD and GRI may only sound like secret agencies or hopeful scrabble choices, they may be relevant at the organization level of reporting.
Further, at the product level Fairtrade, EnergyStar, C2C, USDA Organic, eco-Institut, UL, FSC, Rainforest Alliance, and bluesign to name but a few may offer certification relevance for you.
