Tools for greening your supply chain

This guide is ideal for:

  • Procurement and sustainability professionals who want to make business purchasing decisions more sustainable

  • Employees who make small-scale purchasing decisions and would like to learn more about greener purchasing

When greening your supply chain, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. This guide provides a curated list of resources. We’ve split them into 3 sections:

1.     Getting started: Learning and foundational resources

2.     Delving deeper: Supply chain management tools to map and manage your supply chain

3.     Confirming credentials: Certifications and standards to help you source certified products and services, and evaluate supplier sustainability claims.

Knowledge around green supply chains is always growing. This is a starting point for you. Once you’ve gotten to grips with the basics, we encourage you to look out for emerging resources.

Disclaimer

CitySwitch does not recommend specific providers over others. We recommend you conduct your own research about sustainable procurement resources, tools, and certifications out there.

1. Getting started - learning and foundational resources

There’s a lot to learn, wherever you’re at in your green supply chain journey. Developing a good understanding about the principles of sustainable procurement, and the different approaches, will help you apply these practices in your organisation. Here’s a list of free e-learning resources. These can be used as a resource library to upskill team members.

The DCCEEW has published an extensive Sustainable Procurement Guide and Toolkit. It offers practical assistance about how to consider environmental sustainability and include the use of recycled content into procurement. The guide contains tools, case studies, a list of eco-labels, standards, certifications, and implementation steps.

Benefit: introduces you to sustainable procurement and provides model contract clauses.

The Supply Chain School of Sustainability is a free, collaborative program. The school has many free resources for businesses looking to improve supply chain sustainability. They range from information about common certifications, to sector-specific sustainability modules about net zero, sustainable products and modern slavery. 

Benefit: helps you learn the basics of greening your supply chain.

The Ellen Macarthur Foundation is a charity dedicated to making the circular economy a reality through research, evidence-based solutions and exploring opportunities for individuals and organisations.

The foundation provides video content that explores the diverse topics related to the circular economy.

Benefit: you'll learn more about circularity and circular procurement opportunities to reduce emissions.

ISO20400.org is a not-for-profit website. It aims to share knowledge around the ISO20400 standard, best practice sustainable procurement, and opportunities for organisations to learn.

The site provides real-life case studies of sustainable procurement in action, as well as e-learning, tools, guides, and useful links for supply chain sustainability.

Benefit: you'll feel more comfortable about ISO20400 and best practice procurement.

The GHG Protocol is the most-widely used greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting standard.

The organisation offers multiple e-modules for people looking to know more about the GHG Protocol. Some training modules require a fee to participate. 

Benefit: understanding more about the GHG protocol and scope 3 emissions

The One Planet Network Sustainable Public Procurement Programme is a voluntary partnership across public and private sectors. It aims to accelerate the use of sustainable public procurement. The site offers hundreds of resources about different procurement categories, project types, and stages in the supply chain.

Benefit: find information on catering, construction, and information communications technology in (public) procurement.

2. Delving deeper - supply chain management tools

Whether it’s developing contract clauses, or looking for new, greener suppliers, supplier management and supply chain mapping are complex. Organisations can lean on existing tools for support.

The Chancery Lane Project is an international collaboration of lawyers and business leaders. It aims to drive climate action and help organisations decarbonise supply chains. The project develops and publishes free climate clauses and glossary terms. These cover many aspects of sustainability such as the circular economy and emissions.

Benefit: learn what environmental and social clauses to embed into your contracts.

These guidelines help you design, manage and run more sustainable events. They include a checklist of sustainability actions to consider in the planning, engagement, procurement and merchandising of events.

Benefit: easy to follow checklist for events.

Givvable is a due diligence platform that validates a supplier’s sustainability credentials and claims. Givvable maps suppliers to an organisation’s sustainability targets and tracks suppliers’ progress to meet the ESG requirements.

Benefit: helps you screen supplier sustainability credentials, including organisational commitments and modern slavery risk.

FRDM is a platform that helps you map, monitor, and mitigate human rights and climate risks in your supply chain. It can be customised for your needs and tracks the supply chain including tier 1, 2, 3 suppliers.

Benefit: helps you map your supply chain and analyse modern slavery risk.

GHG Protocol tools enable you to understand your organisation’s GHG emissions and track progress towards your emissions reduction targets. GHG Protocol offers a range of tools including cross-sector, country-specific and sector specific tools.

Benefit: helps you calculate emissions in line with GHG Protocol.

Supply Nation provides Australia’s leading database of verified Indigenous businesses. It can help you achieve your diversity and inclusion objectives by providing a platform where you can search, communicate and tender to Indigenous businesses.

Benefit : discover Indigenous-owned businesses and cross check Indigenous business certifications.

Supply Shift connects buyers and suppliers. It can help you source sustainable products, calculate emissions and improve reporting. Swiftly by Supply Shift is a tool that assesses ESG risks in an organisation’s supply chain.

Benefit: helps you assess and manage environmental, social and governance risk in your supply chain.

These guidelines help you design and introduce sustainable procurement policies. They're targeted to the public sector but are applicable to any organisation looking to introduce sustainable procurement.

Benefit: helps you develop and introduce policies.

3. Confirming credentials - certifications and standards

Third-party verified certifications and standards are useful tools for evaluating the sustainability credentials of a product, service, or organisation. The following list contains common certifications that can be used across multiple categories.

Category: catering

The Aquaculture Stewardship Council certifies environmentally and socially responsible farmed seafood. Its standards cover the potential impacts of aquaculture, including water quality, responsible sourcing of feed, disease prevention, animal welfare, the fair treatment and pay of workers and maintaining positive relationships with neighbouring communities.

Category: all

B Corps are businesses that meet high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency. Certified B Corporations, or B Corps, envision a better economic system where businesses can benefit people, communities, and the planet.

Category: all

Climate Active is an ongoing partnership between the Australian Government and Australian businesses to drive voluntary climate action. The brand represents Australia's collective effort to measure, reduce, and offset carbon emissions to lessen our negative impact on the environment.

How it works: Climate Active certification is awarded to organisations that have reached carbon neutrality according to the requirements of the Climate Active Carbon Neutral Standard. The certification is available for organisations (business operations), products, services, events, precincts and buildings. 

Climate Active helps you identify carbon neutral products, services, and organisations across a diverse range of categories.

Category: facilities management, office furniture, uniforms and cleaning

Cradle to Cradle Certified is the leading multi-attribute standard used globally across industries by designers, brands, and manufacturers when designing and making products.

The standard provides a framework to assess the safety, circularity and responsibility of materials and products across five categories of sustainability performance: material health, product circularity, clean air and climate protection, water and soil stewardship, and social fairness.

Category: IT hardware and facilities management

An energy rating website that provides information about the Equipment Energy Efficiency (E3) program. 

It helps you source equipment with high energy efficiency ratings to reduce operational energy use.

Category: catering and uniforms (cotton)

The fairtrade mark is a highly recognised ethical label. The international fairtrade system aims to end poverty. It works with almost 2 million farmers and workers in developing countries.

Category: catering (plates, cups, utensils), office suppliers (paper) and marketing and merchandising (paper and pulp-based materials)

The FSC forest management certification confirms a forest is being managed in a way that preserves biological diversity and benefits the lives of local people and workers. FSC labels can cover sustainably sourced virgin material and recycled or reclaimed materials.

Category: facilities management and property

Founded by Green Building Council of Australia in 2003, Green Star is an internationally recognised rating system. It sets the standard for healthy, resilient, positive buildings and places. Developed for the Australian environment, Green Star has certified thousands of sustainable fit-outs, buildings, homes, and communities across the country. When looking for property, look for buildings with Green Star ratings.

Category: facilities management and cleaning

GECA is a purpose driven, not for profit organisation that provides solutions for sustainable consumption and production. GECA standards are based on life cycle thinking. They help you understand your sustainability impacts and where they occur in your operation's life cycle, from raw materials to end of-life.

Category: all

There are 12 green tick certification standards covering health, safety and the environment. They are also known as ESG standards - environmental, social and governance. Understanding them will help you source certified sustainable, carbon negative, or organic products and services.

Category: all

ISO 9001 is an international standard for quality management published by the International Organization for Standardisation (ISO). ISO 9001 is an amalgamation of industry best practices.

ISO 14001 is an international standard for the requirements of an environmental management system. It sets out the requirements for an effective environmental management system. It’s designed to work for organisations of all sizes and across all sectors.

If an organisation promotes they follow these standards, it can be an indicator of organisational commitment to sustainability.

Category: catering

The Marine Stewardship Council is an international non-profit organisation.  The MSC Chain of Custody Standard makes sure seafood with the MSC blue fish tick label comes from fisheries that are MSC certified. The MSC Fisheries Standard is used to assess if a fishery is well-managed and sustainable.

The standard reflects the most up-to-date understanding of internationally accepted fisheries science and management.

Category: facilities management and property

NABERS (National Australian Built Environment Rating System) provides simple, reliable, and comparable sustainability measurement across building sectors like hotels, shopping centres, apartments, offices, data centres, and more. When looking for property, look for buildings with NABERS ratings.

Category: all

Science-based targets provide a defined pathway for companies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

How it works: You develop an emissions (scope 1, 2, and 3) target for your organisation and submit to SBT for approval. Once approved, organisations may report on company-wide emissions and track progress each year. Targets must be aligned to the Paris Agreement. 

SBTs show an organisation has a strong commitment to emissions reduction. They can also be an indicator of mature sustainability practices.

Got questions?

We'd love to help you. Contact one of our program managers .