Articles
Environmental assessments give brands and retailers decision-ready data that helps them conduct responsible business, do due diligence, reduce supply chain risk, and inform vendor selection.
But the benefits aren’t just for brands and retailers. Leading suppliers across the consumer goods industry use environmental assessments for their own benefits such as finding cost savings, reducing duplicate audits and assessments, and achieving their own ambitious sustainability goals.
In this article, we explore four myths that keep brands from asking their suppliers to complete assessments (or prevent suppliers from participating), along with truths about each one that many suppliers already know.
Article key points:
- Mature suppliers use assessments to build a business case beyond customer requirements.
- Primary supply chain data allows manufacturers to pair energy and water data with cost data to find savings alongside environmental gains.
- Suppliers can set goals and measure their progress by collecting their own supply chain data from their own facilities and their upstream suppliers.
- The best practice for achieving real results is to use one shared platform that reduces duplicate audits and simplifies benchmarking.
Myth 1: Environmental assessments are only a customer requirement
Brands do ask suppliers for environmental data as part of their due diligence, so assessments can look like a customer requirement to check off the list. However, leading suppliers know there’s a lot more to it than that. Jimmy Summers, Chief Sustainability Officer at Elevate Textiles, explains that his company’s commitment to collecting data and measuring progress comes from within: “It’s our values and our approach to business and being a good corporate citizen, not because you’re making us, but because we want to do this,” Summers says.
That mindset can pay off in more ways than one. Abdul Azeez, AGM Corporate EHSS at Classic Fashion, says that working beyond compliance can help a supplier become a strategic partner with its customers, which brings multiple benefits to the business. Alagesan Senniappan, Executive Vice President, Quality Assurance & ESG at Eastman Exports, describes the competitive advantage his company gets when clients ask if Eastman is aware of new regulations that are coming and he’s able to confidently tell them Eastman is future-ready.
Myth 2: Sustainability is only a cost, not an investment with ROI
If you’re only seeing the costs associated with decarbonization, renewable energy, and water recycling at your facility, you’re missing a large part of the picture. Caner Soytaş, Chief Corporate Officer at Milteks, knows that investing in technology and infrastructure to make production more sustainable also yields tangible financial results.
Milteks collects data through the Higg Facility Environmental Module (Higg FEM), stewarded by Cascale and exclusively available on Worldly. Collecting this data enabled Soytaş to see the financial cost of high energy use and make a business case for moving toward solar power across its factories. Milteks has saved money while achieving its environmental goals and can see exactly how much thanks to its use of the Higg FEM.
"All our facilities are now using Higg FEM and close to 90% of our facilities are using FSLM, which is a great achievement over the years. It definitely helps us to keep track of our supply chain rather than individually auditing them, which would be an unbelievable task."
"It's not enough anymore just to say who are the best suppliers in terms of price, quality, easy to work with, time to market, all that. We also need to make sure that the sustainability angle is part of that decision making."
"The Higg FEM helps us create a roadmap more easily. For example, even if we at Erateks had taken no environmental action, once we started using the Higg FEM, I could learn how to create my own roadmap very easily and clearly see the way forward."
"The Higg FEM and Worldly make our work easier because we work with many different brands. Being able to conduct a self-assessment on a single platform and share it across the brands we work with makes the process much more efficient."
"When we are collecting Higg and FEM data, we see that there is a lot of costs going into the energy bills. So when we realize that, we see that there can be a business case here, not only from a sustainability perspective, but also from a financial perspective as well."
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Myth 3: Supply chain data won’t drive measurable progress
Brands, retailers, and their suppliers alike often worry that collecting data will create reports, not results. The truth, according to top manufacturers who’ve invested in supply chain data collection for multiple years, is actually the opposite.
Dhanujie Jayapala, General Manager Environmental Sustainability at MAS Holdings, says the company set a Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) target for a 25.2 percent absolute greenhouse gas reduction and exceeded it, achieving 25.4 percent at the end of five years.
Other suppliers report progress on energy and water, for example:
- Eastman Exports has phased out coal from its supply chain, and 63 percent of its overall energy consumption is renewable, according to Alagesan Senniappan, Executive Vice President, Quality Assurance & ESG.
- Caner Soytaş, Chief Corporate Officer, says Milteks reuses 80 to 85 percent of its water in manufacturing.
- Seda Toker, Director, Corporate Sustainability at Erateks, says the company plans to raise its renewable energy use to 50 percent and keep its rainwater recycling rate at around 70 percent.
Each of these manufacturer’s targets and results have been made possible by measuring primary supply chain data through assessments like the Higg FEM and Worldly’s Facility Data Manager (FDM).
Myth 4: Environmental assessments are too much work for suppliers that are already stretched thin
Repeating similar assessments for every brand takes time from other impactful work, including the job of actually implementing improvement plans. Suppliers describe how using a unified assessment can solve this challenge.
Sermin Duygu, Sustainability Specialist at Alders Tekstil, says that one of the best parts of using the Worldly platform is the ability to manage both social and environmental questions and performance in one place. Nesrin Başer, Director Corporate Sustainability at SLN Tekstil, adds that sharing assessments with multiple brand partners reduces audit fatigue and workload. Dhanujie Jayapala at MAS Holdings says that with 100 percent of his facilities using the Higg FEM and nearly 90 percent using the Higg Facility Social & Labor Module (Higg FSLM), the company can track its supply chain in a way that’s manageable at scale.
The ability to benchmark against competitors and peers is another benefit to using Worldly. Jesper Ambrosius, Group Responsible Business Director at Spectre, says he uses the platform to compare his company with other Tier 1 suppliers to determine if they’re doing as well as they think they are, and whether they’re staying ahead of the competition.
Leading consumer goods suppliers use Worldly to report, comply, and act
Worldly is the compliance and sustainability platform where consumer goods companies and their suppliers prove how their products are made, so they can report, comply, and act using the primary data they’ve collected.
Completing duplicate, bespoke assessments for every brand takes time away from improvement work and creates assessment fatigue. Worldly gives suppliers and brands one shared platform, so suppliers can share the same assessment data with multiple brand partners instead of completing multiple requests.
Plus, suppliers get real value from being on Worldly. Whether it’s a reduced duplicate workload, better commercial terms with customers, or even access to new markets, joining the tens of thousands of manufacturers already using Worldly comes with numerous benefits.
See the benefits for yourself today. Contact us to get started.
Frequently asked questions
Supplier environmental assessments are structured reviews of a facility’s environmental performance, including energy use, water use, and emissions. Suppliers complete them to give brands and retailers primary data on their operations. Leading suppliers also use the same data to set targets, find cost savings, and reduce duplicate audits.
Environmental assessments help suppliers save money by pairing energy and water data with cost data. Teams can see what they spend on energy and build a business case for changes such as solar power.
Yes. Supplier data supports measurable targets when it is tied to specific goals, such as renewable energy use or water reuse rates. MAS Holdings set a Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) target for a 25.2% absolute greenhouse gas reduction and achieved 25.4% at the end of five years. Eastman Exports reports that 63% of its overall energy consumption is renewable, and the manufacturer has eliminated coal from its supply chain entirely.
A shared platform lets a supplier complete one assessment and share the same data with multiple brand partners, instead of answering a separate request for each one. Worldly provides this shared platform for suppliers and brands.
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