Sustainability has become a defining issue for businesses, and supply chains are at the heart of the challenge. As regulators, investors, customers, and employees place increasing emphasis on environmental and social performance, procurement and supply chain leaders have a critical role to play in driving real change.
But improving sustainability isn’t just about meeting regulatory obligations and company targets: it’s about building a more resilient and responsible business.
Here are five essential steps to enhance your sustainability performance through your supply chain.
1. Map and understand your supply chain
You can’t improve what you can’t see. Many organisations still have limited visibility beyond Tier 1 suppliers, which makes identifying risks or opportunities limited.
Start by mapping your full supply chain and categorising suppliers beyond spend levels to also include a live view of risk, criticality and energy intensity for example. Focus on high-impact areas such as energy use, raw material type and source, logistics and labour practices, including policy considerations on topics such wage equity. Once mapped, you can prioritise where action will have the greatest effect in the short-medium term whilst provoking though on key initiatives for longer-term impacts.
2. Embed ESG criteria into supplier selection and contracts
Sustainability should not be a bolt-on. It needs to be embedded into core procurement activities, starting with how you select, assess, onboard, manage and exit suppliers.
Include environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria in your RFPs, and enhance evaluation models and supplier contracts for improved assessment and lifecycle management. Consider factors like carbon emissions, waste diversion rates, ethical sourcing, material recovery and re-use rates for direct material suppliers, DEI practices, community engagement and impact and code of conduct compliance. Making sustainability a contractual requirement that is actively managed sets expectations and creates accountability for both parties from day one.
3. Collaborate with suppliers, don’t just audit them
Suppliers have a big role to play, but so do you. Improving sustainability is a journey, and suppliers are your partners in that process. Rather than relying solely on compliance checks, focus on collaboration and capability building.
Engage suppliers in your sustainability goals, share data and resources, and offer support where needed, especially for smaller, international or high impact partners. Joint initiatives, such as switching to renewable packaging, streamlining logistics or ramping up material recovery, often yield better results than top-down demands (we will cover that in more detail in a following article).
4. Track, measure and report progress
Establish clear KPIs for sustainability across your supply chain and use digital tools to collect, monitor, and analyse data. Areas to track might include emissions, energy consumption, supplier diversity, or responsible sourcing metrics.
Regular reporting helps you stay on course, meet regulatory requirements, and demonstrate impact to stakeholders and team members. It also enables continuous improvement, highlighting where you’re performing well and where more effort is needed. The data itself is useful – but real impacts come from drawing insight from what is being measured and responding with appropriate action. This demands resource capacity and capability.
5. Align procurement and supply chain with broader ESG strategy
Procurement and supply chain should not operate in a silo. Align your supply chain sustainability efforts with your organisation’s wider ESG strategy, targets and values.
This alignment ensures that procurement decisions support business-wide ambitions, whether that’s achieving Net Zero, improving community impact, or increasing transparency. It also reinforces that procurement and supply chain can jointly build a circular value chain that can be leveraged to deliver responsible growth.
How Accelerate Procurement can help
At Accelerate, we help organisations turn sustainability ambitions into practical supply chain action. From ESG-focused supplier assessments to sustainable sourcing strategies and digital reporting tools, our procurement consultants bring the expertise to make change happen, effectively and compliantly.
Want to make your supply chain a force for good? Let’s talk.