Engaging Suppliers on Sustainability

The business contribution is core to Europe moving towards a sustainable future. However, sustainability is no longer about an individual company’s management. It is about the entire ecosystem.

“The Sustainability Agenda Towards 2030” is a new series of monthly interviews with CSR Europe’s Board Members to shed light on key CSR challenges and how leading companies are turning threats into opportunities.

In this second installment, we talked with Dominique Debecker, Deputy Chief Sustainability Officer at Solvay, about the challenge of building a sustainable supply chain together with a company’s suppliers.

What are the main challenges Solvay face when it comes to fostering supply chain sustainability?

Dominique Debecker: In my view, there is no challenge that is specific to Solvay. Supply chains have become more complex than ever before, with a plurality of actors involved in many countries, more topics to address, and interdependencies to deal with. With the ever-increasing concern of consumers towards sustainability and the environmental and social impact of what they buy, brand owners have moved from a “compliant to regulations” approach to a “let us use sustainability to differentiate in the marketplace” approach. Looking at sustainability from a whole supply chain perspective has become critical today. We must engage with our customers and our suppliers at the same time and act to accelerate the transformation towards sustainable business models. And I do not think this is specific to Solvay.

Last year, right at the beginning of the Covid pandemic in Europe, your company launched Solvay One Planet, a roadmap for a sustainable future. How does Solvay see the role and contribution of its suppliers to achieve this direction?

Dominique Debecker: Solvay One Planet is a set of ten ambitious objectives, KPIs if you like, organized in three pillars: Climate, Resource, and Better Life. Like any other company, Solvay has a magic ingredient in its secret sauce. For us, it is bonding the extra-financial objectives with the financial ones and develop only one strategy to deliver both sets of objectives. Concretely, it means that the Corporate Procurement team has defined its contribution to the Group objectives not only for 2030 (the year of the external commitment) but also for 2025 (as each entity has developed its strategic roadmap for 2021-25).

The contribution of the suppliers is absolutely critical in this journey. How to reduce our scope 3 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions - indirect emissions that occur in a company’s value chain - without partnering up and bonding with your suppliers? I cannot imagine it.

Your company has recently launched a supplier engagement program, the Solvay Supplier Days, with the support of CSR Europe. What prompted Solvay to set up such a program?

Dominique Debecker: Solvay committed recently to the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi). This means that - amongst other things - we have to define an ambitious objective to reduce the CO2 footprint of the raw materials we are buying. The Supplier Engagement program aims at engaging with suppliers to partner up and develop innovative solutions that will eventually reduce the overall CO2 footprint of raw materials without displacing the problem somewhere else. Moving to bio-based raw materials to act on CO2 footprint without considering the impact of this choice on the environment (e.g. biodiversity) or the social impacts (e.g. food availability) would be unconscious.

What do you expect to achieve in this dialogue with suppliers?

Dominique Debecker: Creating the conditions for a trustful and transparent dialogue with the suppliers- to develop innovative solutions to address the climate emergency - requires more than sharing the CO2 footprint of a specific raw material or service. The dialogue with suppliers aims at speaking the same language, putting forward the same content beyond words, and ultimately engaging further in innovative co-development with a significant positive impact on the environment, human beings, and the Profit & Loss Statement.

In your opinion, how can multi-stakeholder collaboration and advocacy contribute to foster supply chain sustainability within companies like Solvay?

Dominique Debecker: Firstly, Solvay is only a drop in the ocean. Even if we were perfect, and we are not, our total positive impact would be negligible. Collaboration - across companies, sectors, with civil society, and, last but not least, with authorities at all levels - is key. Secondly, Solvay sees CSR Europe as the right place to foster such collaborations. The European Pact for Sustainable Industry is a paramount example of it. I appreciate your humility, but I would like to point out that Solvay asked CSR Europe to accompany us in this journey, because of the expertise you developed over the years on sustainable supply chains, and moreover because we need you to build our own capabilities to engage better with our suppliers.

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