Progress in the Year

Work has continued this year to further integrate sustainability into our management processes, support the group’s businesses in delivery of the 2017 targets and further embed sustainability across all businesses and functions. A system of site and functional reviews has been introduced to accelerate progress towards Sustainability 2017.

Johnson Matthey’s vision for a sustainable business has always extended beyond how we operate our manufacturing processes and the nature of the products we supply. Over the past year, work has commenced to understand more fully the sustainability implications of our supply chains through conducting supplier audits, expanding the use of tools and metrics to measure impacts (carbon footprint, streamlined life cycle assessments) and undertaking assessments of alternative end of life opportunities for specific products (adopting a ‘cradle to cradle’ approach).

As stated in our Sustainability 2017 Vision we aim to encourage our suppliers to adopt the values of sustainability which we uphold and during the year we have developed an Ethical and Sustainable Procurement Policy. The process began in March 2009 with a workshop for the group’s European procurement professionals. This highlighted the absence of a group wide procurement policy that encompassed all aspects of sustainability and ethics. Following the workshop a policy was developed and after approval by the CSR Compliance Committee, it was published in May 2010.

The Ethical and Sustainable Procurement Policy applies to all purchases of goods and services and supports our aim of ensuring that the way business is conducted throughout the whole of our supply chain conforms to our own standards. It provides clear guidance on various topics including those relating to the selection of suppliers, auditing against standards and ethical conduct with suppliers. It also sets out how we will conduct business with our suppliers and describes the expectations we have of our suppliers regarding the way they conduct their business.

The new policy will support our existing systems in this area (such as supplier and toll manufacturer audits) and complements our work to further understand life cycle impacts across the supply chain.

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