How We’re Working With Our Supply Partners on Environmental Management

By working together, businesses and supply partners in global supply chains can advance wellbeing and environmental protection across the supply chain.

We know business can be a force for change. Recently a climate scientist, Joëlle Gergis who is a contributor to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated, "All the science is in. Now we need the influencers, the teachers and the business owners to take the baton".

These words are a source of inspiration for us as we look at the environmental impacts we have as a business and across our supply chain.

When it came to looking at our environmental impacts, we started out by looking at the planetary boundaries.

Essentially, the Planetary Boundaries presents a framework that a business can apply to decision-making. These are essentially the nine limits of our planet. According to scientists, four of these boundaries have already been met, reinforcing the need to focus on environmental management and protecting these planetary boundaries. Find out more here.

This highlighted the importance for us to work with our supply partners on environmental management this year, as this is one source of our environmental impacts. We’ve also done research into what the key environmental issues are in supply chains to help inform our approach.

Our aspiration to be a circular business means we have to work on designing out waste and pollution from our supply chain. Read more about circularity means to noissue here.

What we’re working on this year to ensure environmental standards across our supply chain

We are currently consulting with our supply partners on our proposed code of conduct with a questionnaire to find out more information about the environmental practices they have in place for water, waste, chemicals and energy. This will help us collect information on current practices and potential areas for improvement.

We have chosen to focus on water, waste, chemicals and energy as we believe these are the most relevant to our impact and operations and represent some of the biggest issues globally.

There are many ways supply partners can work on lowering their environmental impacts. For example, one of our supply partners in Australasia is converting waste into clean energy.

We are lucky to have noissue members on the ground in all our key manufacturing locations to help monitor and assist with this focus and approach, and this  helps ensure greater transparency across our supply chain.

Alongside environmental management, we are also committed to the health, safety and wellbeing of our supply partners. We’ve been able to rely on leading international standards such as International Labour organisation and BSCI certification which ensures UN Global Compact and other leading standards are adhered to - you can read more about our progress here.

The combination of social and environmental standards is what we believe makes a responsible supply chain.

We are also constantly localising our supply chain, for example in June 2021 we onboarded 8 new local suppliers to our supply network.  This is part of our carbon reduction strategy – stay tuned for our progress on carbon reduction, which is coming soon!

At noissue we also select materials that have a lower environmental impact on water, waste and energy. For example, we use non toxic inks and dyes, this is one way we reduce negatively impacting water quality.

We also use a Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified range, including FSC-recycled paper. Recycling roughly one ton of paper, reduces greenhouse gas emissions by one ton of carbon equivalent, and saves around 7,000 gallons of water. FSC's forest management standards ensure protection of water quality and prohibit highly hazardous chemicals while also ensuring indigenous communities are protected.

This is all part of our noissue circularity frameworks of which all noissue products fit into one of  (compostable, recycled and reusable), which you can read more about here.

Wrapping it Up

Since introducing our Sustainability Framework for 2021 earlier this year, we’ll be sharing the roadmap noissue is working on to continuously improve our ecosystem.

Our manufacturing partners play a key role in this ecosystem, and we’re committed to working with them on environmental goals as we move towards a better future together.

Stay tuned for further updates on how we progress!