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Anthony Puech

Nov 11, 2022

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Sustainability is not about publishing report maybe?

by Phil

I’m spending a lot of time doing research for ages. Learning is crucial since society and technology is going so fast and there is so much of information available and so much to discover and understand… you need to keep yourself in a good intellectual shape.

Sometimes what you read… reading so much of sustainability stuff for months and ask yourself: WTF is a sustainable report? I found an example not so far from the Retail industry.

“Vanderlande is a material handling and logistics automation company based in Veghel, Netherlands. In 2021, the company reported revenue of 1.789 billion Euro making it the world's fourth-largest materials handling systems supplier.”

2.4 billion Euro now. We’re talking here about logistics, airport, warehouses, parcels.

“Vanderlande has published its FY2022 Sustainability Report, which outlines company’s performance, overall approach and specific activities in this increasingly important area of corporate life. The publication is written in accordance with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the most widely adopted sustainability reporting standard. This edition of the Report specifically covers actions taken between 1 April 2020 and 31 March 2022.”

The Global Reporting Initiative is an international independent standards organization, based in Amsterdam (a neighbor) that helps businesses, governments and other organizations understand and communicate their impacts on issues such as climate change, human rights and corruption.

Good news, you can buy your own report on the shelf.

Well, that’s 64 pages.

I was curious of what inside a sustainability report.

Like carbon footprint of supply chain?

“As is the case with many companies, most of our CO2 emissions and climate risks are situated in our supply chain. The challenge is measuring these emissions, as there are so many sources of carbon to take into account.

Within our supply and value chain, we are working on reducing our carbon footprint by 5% year on year towards our net-zero target in 2040. Carbon in the supply chain is categorised as Scope 3 emissions. Although we currently don’t have a full Scope 3 CO2 analysis, we estimate that this category contributes to over 90% of our emissions. As a first step in reducing the carbon footprint of our supply chain, we’ve created initiatives to estimate our Scope 3 emissions for categories 1 and 9 of the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol by the end of FY2023. This covers purchased goods and services, as well as downstream transportation.

We also aim to implement and create a new global supply chain network tooling, to be operational by FY2024. This process will deliver insights into balancing the global supply and demand. Finding a balance will help us to execute projects more effectively and at the same time reduce our CO2 footprint.

In addition, we are taking steps to regionalize our supply chains, so they are closer to our customer’s sites. This will help to reduce emissions, especially in terms of the transport of parts and delivery of our products.

To achieve our 5% CO2 footprint year on year reduction target, we’re working on a number of supply chain-related projects that include:

> optimizing order policies, which by the end of FY2022 had led to a reduction of approximately 5% of the total number of orders in comparison with FY2021

> building up pallets in trucks and containers in the most efficient way possible to reduce the number of equipment deliveries

> and selecting transport service providers via a system in which their carbon emissions are heavily weighted as a part of the selection criteria.”

Page 24 and 25.

What else you can find?

Percentage of women in senior management positions: 12.6%

Only 2 genders?!

Also… The company established in 2018 a Good Business department to strengthen our compliance management. “This because (they) consider conducting business the ethical way to be a normal part of our activities.

”I learned in my career that Generally Accepted Accounting Principles do not avoid bankruptcy, nor stop fraud. Also that all those ISO norms do not help companies to work more efficiently. It’s just a business world obsessed by standards.

If you want the full report, download it here.