Have yourself a sustainable little Christmas…

It’s the season to be jolly! A time to wish goodwill to all people on the planet. However, for all of its wonder and splendour, Christmas isn’t particularly a time of goodwill for the planet, due to our abundance of less sustainable Christmas traditions.

Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be the case, and there are several more sustainable Christmas traditions you can adopt to reduce your environmental footprint. You could wrap your presents in eco-friendly packaging this year, or perhaps you could save your wrapping paper from this year for reuse if you haven’t torn your presents open with excitement. Perhaps you should keep an eye on the level of food waste and ensure that the leftover food that is chucked into the bin is kept to a minimum.

Whilst we should all be doing our part for the environment at home to help reduce our own personal environmental footprint, and pave the way for a more sustainable future, the reality is that companies contribute to the total number of emissions from the UK. Therefore, to generate a significant level of change, companies need to achieve their sustainability targets not just in the UK, but on an international scale.

This will involve reducing all types of emissions, including Scope 3, which contributes to a significant proportion of emissions in a company’s supply chain.

These are emissions that aren’t created by the company directly, but are generated because of company actions but aren’t actually controlled by the company itself. For example, they could come from the company that supplies them with products.

These are the emissions that are the least visible, yet frequently contribute the most to the company’s carbon footprint from their supply chain, and therefore must be reduced for companies to receive their net-zero goal targets.

Visibility must be increased between the supplier and the company to achieve this end during the process of on-boarding supplier data.

Work with sustainable suppliers using ARCUS^® Supplier Management Software

ARCUS^® Supplier Information Management (SIM) can help companies achieve their sustainability targets moving forward by increasing transparency between the supplier and the company during the supplier information on-boarding period.

Using questionnaires, the supplier can be required to give key information regarding the sustainable practices of their company, allowing the organisation to assess the overall carbon footprint of their supply chain, by increasing visibility between the supplier and company regarding their own environmental impact.

This can allow the business to reduce their level of emissions across the scope categories that the company generally has a lower level of visibility surrounding, and to increase the level of transparency between the supplier and company, to assess whether their current suppliers will allow them to achieve this end.

To learn more about how ARCUS^® SIM can help increase transparency between company and supplier, have a look at our case study.