5 Tips for Measuring and Reporting Your Sustainable Procurement Progress

Do you have a sustainable procurement policy but struggle to make meaningful changes in how you buy? Do you have trouble understanding if your actions are positively impacting your community?

On October 15, 2020, members of the Canadian Collaboration for Sustainable Procurement (CCSP) gathered to learn how to set, monitor, and report on their program performance from expert speakers Andrea Westfall, Sustainable Procurement Coordinator at the City of Mississauga and John Bys, Public Sector Specialist at EcoVadis. Find below a summary of tips to apply in your organization!

The Basics

Measurement and reporting allows you to take regular stock of your progress towards achieving your goals. An effective measurement and evaluation system:

• Helps define sustainability within an organization,
• Highlights what’s working well,
• Identifies areas for improvement, and
• Creates accountability for staff.

It’s imperative to set strategic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that align with your overall goals. These KPIs fall into two categories:

1. Process indicators – how well an organization is aligning practices with your sustainable procurement strategy, action plan, and policy. For example, some may track percentage of bids included sustainability, number of supplier audits, or number of staff trained in sustainable procurement.

2. Outcome indicators – specific social, environmental, or economic impacts. For example, this could include number of jobs created or amount of waste diverted from landfills.

Under outcome indicators, you can choose to assess two different types of sustainability performance:

1. Product- or service-level sustainability – specific features of the purchase, such as toxic chemicals, recycled content, or number of people employed from a target group.

2. Enterprise-level sustainability – leadership practices of the organization as a whole, such as less waste in their dumpsters, less energy consumed, best practice health and safety policies, or diversity and inclusions practices, etc.

5 Tips for Measuring and Reporting

1. Start by assessing your reporting capabilities

Do you already have dedicated purchasing reports that collect useful data? What can you easily start monitoring? You’ll want to find a few initial KPIs to start monitoring ASAP.

Once those initial KPIs are being tracked, assess what’s possible in the medium- and long-term. Do you have the ability to request new reports? Do you have budget for a better reporting server or dedicated IT support? Choose your KPIs while keeping in mind that the cost of manually collecting data must equal the benefit of the KPI to your organization. If it’s not useful or meaningful to your team, leadership, Council/Board, or the public, it’s not likely something worth tracking.

If you’re a CCSP member, follow the lead of the City of Calgary who presents the CCSP’s Annual Report to Council, showcasing their benchmarking ratings and success story as a testament to their progress. No additional work necessary!

2. Move from process to outcomes indicators

Start by measuring process indicators. They are easier to track and will help show progress quickly. Outcome indicators are often harder to track and may require certain infrastructure and/or training to accurately measure.

The City of Mississauga launched Phase 1 of their Sustainable Procurement Implementation Plan in 2018. The Plan has three overarching goals and six objectives to help reach those goals. To measure how successful, they set and monitored 13 KPIs related to their goals and objectives. The focus is largely process outcomes such as the percentage of buyers, client departments staff, and suppliers trained. However, they included training outcome indicators using pre- and post-surveys to measure comprehension and likelihood to apply knowledge. As the implementation comes to a close, the City plans to integrate more outcome indicators for Phase 2.

3. Avoid greenwashing by leveraging third-party verification

According to a CCSP poll, 89% of members did not have a way of consistently measuring their suppliers’ enterprise-level sustainability practices, while the remaining 11% use self-report sustainability questionnaires. Leveraging third-party assessments, who collect and assess sustainability data from globally recognized sources, can:

• Can validate and compare suppliers claims
• Track suppliers’ results over time
• Provide recommendations for improvement
• Engage sustainable suppliers to further innovate

Learn more about EcoVadis in their 3-minute Ratings Solution Overview video, SPLC’s Whitepaper on Strategies to Maximize Engagement in Sustainable Public Purchasing EcoVadis’ library of sustainable sourcing resources for public actors.

4. Share info externally and internally

KPIs that no one looks at aren’t useful. Make sure you have a plan of how you’re going to communicate your results. Can they be integrated into existing reports and communications? Do you have an intranet with a section where they could be posted? Show your key stakeholders that your efforts are driving organizational goals. Use your results to inspire action and make a case for more resources.

At the City of Mississauga, these KPI’s are uploaded to an internal dashboard to create visibility. Approved staff have access to view the dashboard in real-time and data is pulled from here into larger reports. The dashboard in particular creates visibility for the work and provides proof of concept, answer questions like: What is the program for? Is time being used effectively? Are they on track to meet our goals? For greater accountability, visibility and impact, mandate annual public reports within your policy like the City of Vancouver or the State of Maryland.

5. Leverage success stories to go beyond the numbers

Collect and share engaging success story stories that include humor, graphics, and inspiring messages. This is a friendly way showcase progress to folks who aren’t used to looking at data all day. It will make your program come to life!

City of Mississauga shares success stories like it’s “Ice, Ice Baby” example whereby the fleet team used a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) tool to discover that purchasing electronic ice resurfacers was cheaper over the total lifespan and reduced it’s emissions by 832 tonnes (eCO2)—equivalent to taking 255 cards off the road.

Bonus Tip

It’s not enough to simply measure and report KPIs, you should review and update your KPIs as your expertise and program evolves and verify and benchmark your progress using third parties like the CCSP, SDGs, and SPLC to align with best practices.

_______________________

WRITTEN BY: ALYSSA MCDONALD, PROGRAM MANAGER AT THE CANADIAN COLLABORATION FOR SUSTAINABLE PROCUREMENT (CCSP)

WANT TO STAY UP TO DATE WITH OTHER SUSTAINABLE PROCUREMENT NEWS IN CANADA? FOLLOW THE CCSP ON LINKEDIN AND SIGN-UP TO THE CCSP’S MONTHLY NEWSLETTER.

Banning Straws Won’t Save our Planet; But Changing Attitudes Just Might

Already following the plastic straw ban in Seattle,  Washington we’ve seen Disney, Starbucks, and several other companies come forward with similar bans. And while we applaud the efforts of these companies as they continue their “journey of environmental stewardship” (in the words of Disney), we need to remind ourselves what the real problem is that we’re trying to solve.

The truth is that plastic straws are estimated to be a mere 0.03 percent of ocean plastic waste. While straws have enormous potential to cause harm to wildlife, the real concern regarding ocean waste is the huge amount of abandoned fishing debris (estimated to be 46% of all ocean waste) as well as the huge volumes of plastic bags and plastic bottles creating floating islands of debris all over the world. In reality, our consumer attitudes towards the convenience of single-use items and our misplaced belief that we can compost or recycle our way out of this eco-dystopia, is really the more substantive issue.

That’s why I was so impressed to be included in the team working on the Sustainability Program for the Special Olympics 2018 USA Games held in Seattle earlier this month. Once again, a mega-sporting event (4,000 athletes, 14,000 volunteers, nearly 100,000 spectators) demonstrated that it’s the sustainability legacy that matters just as much and probably far more, than the impact of ‘greening’ initiatives. Listen to this school teacher from Oklahoma in the associated video– her story confirms that by attending the Games, being exposed to the Sustainability Program, and being inspired by the greening activities (even straw bans) means that she’s changed her attitude. Even more significantly, she’ll be taking home these inspirations to share with school kids and others – with enormous potential impact on progression!

So, we encourage corporate groups to continue their efforts to reduce their eco-impacts and transition to a more circular form of economy. No doubt every little bit helps. But let’s remember what really matters – capturing the hearts and minds of everyone around us to make those small and big shifts that can really tilt the difference to a sustainable future.

The New MCSP Annual Report: Contributing to an evidence-based shift in perceptions about sustainable purchasing

Reeve Consulting and the Municipal Collaboration for Sustainable Procurement (MCSP) are pleased to release our seventh annual MCSP State of the Nation Report. As always, the report provides a comprehensive and up-to-date discussion of the latest trends, best practices, examples and case studies in sustainable purchasing at Canadian municipalities, and now, for the first time in 2016, the MCSP welcomed educational institutions, that are also profiled in the report.

The 2016 annual report has a specific focus on recounting members’ experiences in developing their sustainable purchasing programs and carrying out sustainable purchasing work. We continue to hear from our members and others that the best way to get decision-makers on board with sustainable purchasing philosophies is to demonstrate the value that sustainable purchasing can have in working toward myriad strategic priorities and concrete examples. As a result, we have profiled dozens of case studies and examples from our members, alongside an in-depth discussion of trends, challenges, and what’s to come in the year ahead.

Download the full report here, or learn more.

Happy reading!

lululemon’s Sustainable Purchasing Journey

lululemon’s 2016 work on improving the sustainability of their supply chain was recently profiled in the purchasing publication, Purchasing B2B. Reeve worked with the Vancouver-based fitness and lifestyle apparel company to deepen the integration of sustainability into their operational purchasing procedures, and to create tools to help buyers accomplish this.

Responsible Supply Chain features prominently on lululemon’s sustainability page

Julie Strilesky, Sustainability Operations Manager for lululemon, reported to Purchasing B2B that since making the changes, “nearly a dozen projects will have sustainable criteria incorporated into the products and services being purchased.”

The changes lululemon has incorporated into operational procurement have empowered purchasing team members to capitalize on sustainability opportunities, and have increased collaboration between the sustainability and procurement teams. Their journey so far has already imparted several key lessons, including the importance of engaging early in the procurement process, to ensure that sustainability can be adequately integrated, as well as how vital it is to build relationships with decision-makers across the organization to gain buy-in and traction.

Most importantly, lululemon recognizes that sustainable purchasing is a journey, and they are looking forward to many impactful successes to come.

Colliers Project Leaders Sustainability Impact Report: a new wave of sustainability reporting

Colliers Project Leaders, the project management branch of parent-company Colliers International, recently released their Sustainability Impact Report, which introduces a bold way of thinking about corporate sustainability reporting that goes beyond a traditional exclusive focus on internal operations.

When it came to producing a sustainability report, Colliers Project Leaders elected to take a step back and evaluate exactly where their material (that is, significant or important) sustainability impacts reside. Although they knew they wanted to track their internal paper use, the greenhouse gas footprint of their own offices, and other impacts of their operations, they realized that this would omit two important spheres of sustainability influence in which they operate.

Colliers Project Leaders’ main innovation is to acknowledge that they share responsibility for the ultimate sustainability impacts of their projects.

A materiality assessment they conducted revealed that, in terms of the importance to both their stakeholders and to their company, they had to take a good look not only at the company’s sustainability impacts in terms of their operations, but also sustainability as it relates to both their people, and the projects that they manage (see below). Thus, they reported upon sustainability in three categories: “Our Operations,” including governance, environmental footprint, and community contributions, “Our People,” including safety, health, wellness, and opportunities for professional development and volunteerism, and “Our Projects,” including client satisfaction, sustainability in their processes, community and user impacts, and ultimately advocacy for the future of sustainable building.

Colliers Project Leaders’ main innovation is to acknowledge that they share responsibility for the ultimate sustainability impacts of their projects. As a project management firm that manages hundreds of large capital projects each year, Colliers Project Leaders recognizes that they are in the position to help their clients see the benefits of working in line with circular economy principles throughout the process, from design and procurement, to execution, and of ensuring that community members and end-users are appropriately consulted so that projects are carried out to benefit stakeholders to the maximum extent.

Although Colliers Project Leaders does not have all of the data or all of the answers just yet, they have committed to advocating for an environmentally and socially regenerative economy through the building projects they manage – and we think that sets them up for leadership and success.

From Sustaining to Renewing: Where Purchasing Fits in the Circular Economy

method’s soap bottles made from recovered ocean plastic

With the world’s atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration exceeding what is considered a permanent threshold at 400ppm last month, there’s now more cause than ever to think a little differently about where we’re going – and that’s what the push toward the “circular economy” is all about. Companies and consumers are now thinking not just about the sustainability of their purchases for the planet, but are also looking at ways to help renew the natural environment through their supply chain choices.

When companies purchase with the goal of contributing to a circular economy, they are typically purchasing something originating from what would traditionally have been waste, used in an innovative way. Most often, this sourcing is understood to go beyond products from traditional recycling streams (e.g. recycled paper and plastics), employing materials or inputs that would otherwise have been left to generate some form of pollution.

The following are a few examples of how companies are driving circular economy initiatives through their supply chain choices:

Although not yet a huge portion of the market, some companies are producing paper from agricultural waste, such as sugarcane waste and wheat straw. Much agricultural waste is normally burned, releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. By using the agri-waste for paper, some emissions from its disposal are actually avoided, while forests are conserved.

Similarly, innovative food companies are now using ingredients that would traditionally be considered food waste to create desirable products, such as teas, jams, and even chocolate whisky. Given the lower cost to these inputs (often only involving time spent to collect or retrieve them) using food waste as an input lends itself well to small and medium sized enterprises, thus having a dual benefit of promoting local economic development where they are located.

Method, a home and body care product company, have packaged their ocean plastic 2-in-1 dish + hand soap in bottles made from recovered sea plastic and post-consumer recycled plastic. They partnered with local beach clean up groups in Hawaii to source the plastic for their bottles, thereby decreasing plastic pollution in our oceans.

adidas’ sea plastic shoes made in partnership with Parley for the Oceans last spring

Clothing companies using recovered plastics are more controversial, given recent concerns about tiny plastic fibres entering our water system when synthetic fibres are laundered, but they may at least present an opportunity to use some of the plastic that is already in our oceans, while we transition to more preferable materials for textiles across the board. Bionic Yarn, a textile company that sources the material used to make its unique yarns from recovered plastic. The company has partnered with nonprofit Parley for the Oceans to source plastic recovered from the sea, thereby avoiding the use of new materials, while helping to clean up this big problem for our oceans. Bionic has also created partnerships with big brands downstream in the supply chain, such as adidas and G-Star Raw, to make apparel and shoe products with their yarns.

Diverting waste from landfills and recycling systems into the supply chain is not a perfect environmental solution to over-consumption, but it certainly conserves new material inputs and reduces negative impacts from existing waste – and this renews our conviction in the positive potential of the supply chain.