Sustainable Procurement News

Louise Nicholls, M&S Head of Responsible Sourcing and Packaging: “The next big challenge we’ve got is that the world of labour rights is changing. It’s no longer about ethical trade which is a risk to business, but rather a risk to rights holders and we need to set up our business to understand what that looks like.
It’s about how well you understand those risks in the extended supply chain in what is a much more hyper-transparent world. We are now in a very different space and it’s much more open, to the point where you need to be talking about what you’re doing to address these issues, and how well you’re doing your due diligence.”

Syrian refugee children have been working in factories making clothes for British high street retailer Marks & Spencer and online store ASOS, an investigation by BBC Panorama found.
The investigation, to be broadcast Monday evening, found Syrian refugees as young as 15 working long hours for little pay, making and ironing clothes in Turkey, to be shipped off to Britain.

Transforming an unsustainable global supply chain can seem daunting. As much as a single company may be committed to change, it’s almost impossible to do it alone. There is a need for peers and competitors to become colleagues and mentors to enable all. Collective action possesses a raw power that enables us to imagine a different reality. And once that happens we put solutions squarely within the realm of the possible and probable.