EcoVadis in the Press - Articles and bylines

Recent analysis finds more than 4,000-mile detour to avoid Red Sea attacks could dramatically increase global shipping industry's carbon emissions
A wave of CO2 emissions caused by diverting commercial shipping around the southern tip of Africa to avoid attacks by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea could jeopardise the industry's climate goals and damage...

The Hospitality Alliance for Responsible Procurement (HARP) is an EcoVadis-powered sector initiative by a group of international hospitality companies and their key Global Procurement Organisations: Accor, Hilton, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International, Radisson Hotel Group, Avendra and Entegra.

Corporate sustainability management company EcoVadis launched the Hospitality Alliance for Responsible Procurement, or HARP, with founding members Hilton Worldwide, Marriott International, Radisson Hotel Group, Accor and IHG Hotels & Resorts. The alliance also includes procurement organizations Avendra and Entegra.

HARP acts as a collaborative corporate sustainability initiative to rate hotel suppliers—cleaning product providers, laundry services, food and beverage suppliers and others—using EcoVadis' scorecard ratings to identify providers that will contribute to sustainable procurement practices and eco-friendly operations across the industry.

Suppliers are facing increasing pressure from the buyers of their goods and services to report their environmental, social, and governance data. As corporations announce plans to be Net Zero across their end-to-end supply chain at some point in the future – often 2050 – they then need their suppliers to participate in helping them meet their goals. Corporations are kicking off these initiatives both because their customers expect it and because of increasing regulatory pressure. Increasingly, companies will take sustainability criteria into account in their purchasing decisions.

Large corporations often have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of direct material suppliers. Getting suppliers to participate is a gargantuan task. Increasingly, EcoVadis is becoming known as the go to organization to help corporations accelerate this journey to collect upstream supplier environmental, social, and governance data. 

The modern supply chain is a bit of a trapeze act: complex, requiring precision and potentially devastating if things go wrong. Pete Rau of EcoVadis invites companies to return to basics — it all starts with procurement.

Leading supply chain sustainability platforms include EcoVadis, Sourcemap, Assent, MS Sustainability Cloud, OneTrust, Achilles & Avetta.

With sustainability now a boardroom priority because of stakeholder pressure and expectations, supply chains are an urgent point of focus – and this has given rise to a welter of cloud-based ESG and risk-management platforms. 

In the past year, the global economy and supply chains were tested by a series of new and existing challenges, including a rise in disruptions caused by climate change, stalled progress on reducing global poverty, and a surge in modern slavery. In addition, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created a humanitarian crisis and contributed to inflation, energy volatility and sluggish economic growth. 

Complex sustainability challenges such as these cannot be addressed in isolation. The private sector is being urged to work together and take advantage of global supply chain interconnectivity, to drive sustainable change at scale.

Recent European supply chain due diligence laws, such as the Germany’s Act on Corporate Due Diligence Obligations in Supply Chains (LkSG) and EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, are now setting more perspective requirements for supply chain responsibility, says Pete Rau, vice president of solution consulting at EcoVadis, a provider of business sustainability ratings.

“We believe these new regulations are a good sign for levelling the playing field and raising everyone’s game and should apply to pharma companies as they would any other industry,” he says.

Suppliers and vendor partners are key stakeholders for OPG, so the team is careful to build and maintain strong relationships. In addition to informing suppliers of the company’s various programs and expectations surrounding the supply chain, OPG recently engaged business sustainability-rating provider EcoVadis to conduct ESG evaluations through the company’s value chain, beginning with key suppliers who are evaluated on the basis of environmental performance, labour and human rights, ethics, and sustainably procurement.

H/Advisors/Sustain webinar hosted by Ryan Kisiel (London) and Sebastien Ricard (Paris).

Partnership will drive sustainability into the supply chain by operationalizing supplier sustainability ratings and improving business process efficiency

CELOSPHERE 2022 - Celonis, the global leader in execution management and EcoVadis, the world’s most trusted supplier sustainability ratings platform, announced a partnership to make business procurement processes more sustainable. Celonis will integrate EcoVadis sustainability ratings data into the Celonis Execution Management System (EMS). 

This joint commitment from Celonis and EcoVadis is part of the Celonis strategy to empower every company to reduce its carbon impact and execute in a sustainable way through the elimination of process inefficiencies. The Celonis strategy is based on embedding sustainability practices into day-to-day process operations for all of its customers and partners. 

Procurement, once seen as a traditional back-office function, has transformed into a strategic powerhouse that can drive organizational success.

Although the Environmental Protection Agency reports 90 percent of organizations’ greenhouse gas emissions come from their supply chains, driving decarbonization at scale remains a challenge because many businesses don’t know where to begin on their decarbonization journeys, according to sustainability consultancy EcoVadis.  To achieve greater impact, companies need to get more precise in reporting their carbon footprint – down to the individual products, components and services they are buying.

Earlier this year EPSNews Editor-in-Chief Barb Jorgensen spoke with Julia Salant, EcoVadis’ general manager, carbon solutions, about the organization’s 2023 Carbon Action Report and tools, such as EcoVadis’ Carbon Action Module, that assist businesses with their decarbonization efforts. Here are excerpts from the conversation.

Scope 3 data won’t be required under the California law until 2027, while the mandate to report emissions under Scopes 1 and 2—from operations and outputs from energy use—starts in 2026. When signing the bill, however, Newsom said that the deadlines are likely infeasible and that his administration will work to address the issue.

But some businesses will want to get a head start on the California law by voluntarily reporting ahead of the requirements. It’s an opportunity “to manage risk and control the narrative,” said EcoVadis’s Salant.

Spend Matters constantly updates its understanding of the state of the procurement tech market via RFIs for our SolutionMap dataset, vendor interviews, global event attendance and product demos with the aim of keeping tech-selection decision makers ahead of market trends. But we also endeavor to grow our understanding of the wants and needs of the customers using that tech – the practitioners.

In one series of interviews this summer and through to the end of the year, we are talking to vendors about what their customers really want from them and how they are proposing to address those needs. In a second one, we are talking to the end users about their expectations and requirements.

This week we spoke with Emily Rakowski, Chief Marketing Officer, EcoVadis.

Sustainability in business has reached beyond gathering metrics and pleasing stakeholders. It’s become a mission unto itself. This sentiment was embodied in the statement that Richard Eyram, chief customer officer at EcoVadis made when he was appointed to his current position. “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform businesses across the globe into a force for good,” he said. He sees the role of his company, to “engage and inspire an entire generation of business leaders to make sustainability a priority and drive the positive impact our plant and society desperately need.”

Expert interviews
What does it take to build a billion-dollar company? What are the critical success factors for European tech? How to remain resilient in a challenging market and benefit from economic downturns? This year’s report features expert views from leading founders and CEOs, including Oyster HR, Personio, Neo4j, Dataiku, and EcoVadis.

Nicole Sherwin, senior vice president for executive customer advisory and strategy - who joined EcoVadis more than 12 years ago when it was a startup - said many younger candidates want to work with firms that address climate change and human rights.

"They know about these issues, they know why they matter - and there is an expectation specifically for companies to be doing something about it," she said.

As awareness of the need for a greener and more ethical approach to procurement builds among managers, suppliers of goods like palm oil or clothing are having to respond by adding sustainable expertise in-house, Sherwin said.

Published by Bain & Company and EcoVadis, the study covers 80,000 private companies and a further 20,000 listed companies. It was global, with results tracked from businesses in an array of countries and sectors.

While not every business working to improve its environmental and social impact recorded revenue growth and earnings, the majority did. And, in all cases, the study found “no strong negative correlation”.

The study highlights four strongly positive correlations between ESG and profitability. One of these is that businesses with the most satisfied employees have three-year revenue growth up to 6% above those in their sectors with the least satisfied employees. 2019 to 2021 is the three-year period assessed. Additionally, at firms with the least satisfied employees, the average net income margin was 10%. At firms with the most satisfied staff, this increases to 16%.

Techstrong TV’s Bonnie Schneider speaks with Madhur Aggarwal, chief product officer at EcoVadis, about helping organizations assess and engage with their suppliers on sustainability performance. Plus learn about Ecovadis’s partnership with Microsoft, and the future of sustainability assessments.

Although the international community has generally acknowledged that business globalization reduced poverty in many regions, there is another scourge that is still thriving across sprawling corporate supply chains. Despite increased global attention, resources and regulations, 10 million more people were living in slavery conditions in 2021 compared to 2016, according to International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates. Of the 50 million people worldwide living in slavery — owned by another human being — in 2021, 28 million are trapped in forced labor.  

Moreover, it often surprises many that forced labor is highly present in developed countries: More than 52% of all forced labor can be found in upper-middle-income or high-income countries.