With so many moving parts (the EPA counts 15 total scope 3 emissions categories), tracking it all can be challenging, and not every piece is relevant to every organization. This is why it’s necessary to maintain governance by selecting vetted and responsible supply chain partners.
Here are three tips to help you engage with your supply chain to reduce your environmental impact:
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Align on materiality. To do this, you must first go through the process of conducting your own materiality assessment, where you identify, refine, and assess environmental, social and governance issues impacting your business and where your business is impacting society and the environment. This type of assessment can help start a dialogue in your company and with affected stakeholders, including your supply chain, around sustainability. Once you’ve identified your material topics, you can use that information to build a strategy that includes selecting partners that can help you ensure compliance and meet your goals.
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Gather and synchronize data. Data is essential to any sustainability program. Organizations gather “activity data” from key sources and calculate their impact. Choose supply chain partners who can easily provide reliable data and transparent calculation methodology.
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Build community. Ask your vendors (and potential vendors) to tell you about their sustainability efforts. Then look at the work you do together. Start a conversation and discuss ways to reduce your combined impact. By building a community across your supply chain, you’ll experience environmental improvements that can lead to cost reductions, business opportunities, areas of innovation, and the chance to help support global climate change mitigation efforts.
Ask your supply chain vendors the right questions
Talk to your procurement team to better understand your supply chain partners and existing engagement strategies and evaluation criteria. They can provide you with a list of every vendor your company works with, and from there, you can prioritize what vendors you need to engage with to ensure you meet your goals. You can even consider using third-party reporting tools to evaluate their performance.
Whether you’re already working together or you’re evaluating new partners, consider asking:
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Do you report annually on your sustainability impacts?
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Have you set any environmental goals?
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Do you have a science-based emissions reduction target?
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If your report on emissions, does a third party assure it?
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What data can you provide me on the environmental impacts of my program?
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How can you help me reach my environmental goals?
Stay accountable to your sustainability commitments.
By including data from your supply chain partners in your reporting, your organization will establish itself as more accountable, comprehensive, and transparent when it comes to your sustainability efforts, which ultimately reflects on the integrity of your brand. So, when it’s time to add a new partner to your supply chain, make sure your goals are aligned, ask them to provide you with the sustainability data you need, and start having regular conversations about ways you can lessen your overall environmental impact.
How can Iron Mountain support your sustainability goals?
Iron Mountain understands that like us, our customers are striving to achieve sustainability targets, and data is key to that journey. In addition to reporting annually through widely adopted frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative, Ecovadis, CDP, and CDP Supply Chain, we have built a number of reports that provide customers with insights into their programs at Iron Mountain and their environmental impacts.
Available reports include:
Our Secure Shredding Green Report, includes data on the total amount of paper shredded and recycled during a specified time period, along with descriptions of the environmental benefits such as trees and water saved. The report leverages the Paper Calculator from the Environmental Paper Network to provide a credible and influential assessment of the environmental impact of paper recycling.
Our Asset Lifecycle Management Environmental Benefits Report illustrates the environmental impacts of remarking and recycling IT Assets using a widely accepted calculation methodology (WARM model). Our Environmental Benefits Report allows customers to report on the positive environmental impact your program delivers including: Waste diverted from landfill, avoided greenhouse gas emissions, energy saved, metals recovered and diverted from landfill and the percentage of products remarked versus recycled.
Our Data Center Green Power Pass report is an industry-endorsed, fully-transparent renewable energy solution for companies seeking to report greenhouse gas or CO2 reductions associated with the green power they consume at Iron Mountain data centers. It allows customers to take credit for the green energy that Iron Mountain purchases, enabling them to report these benefits in their sustainability reporting.
Our Customer Scope 3 Allocation Report allocates Iron Mountain's Scope 1 and 2 emissions to our customers using a spend-based allocation methodology, which also takes into account the types of services provided.
Learn more about how Iron Mountain can help support your sustainability goals here.
*A study by MIT's Sustainable Supply Chain Lab
