Could you be prosecuted for ‘greenwash’?
Inflation and disruption is putting massive pressure on the construction supply chain. That can’t be at the expense of supply chain integrity. We report.
A study published by the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS) found that 48% of supply chain managers did not believe their organisations were transparent enough with clients and regulators about sustainability.
A further 19% admitted not even knowing how sustainable their products were themselves, despite marketing claims about commitments made to sustainability.
The CIPS suggested a lack of procurement involvement in setting corporate sustainability strategy in the UK is at least partly to blame.
Much of the UK’s carbon footprint is generated abroad, several tiers down the supply chain in the extraction of raw materials, manufacturing of products and transportation. It argues the procurement function has a crucial role in understanding, measuring, and addressing the sustainability of this supply chain.
“If you don’t know where something is coming from then you run the risk of making claims which aren’t true,” says Rob McGlennon, MD, Deceuninck.
He argues the launch of the Green Claims Code by the Competitions and Market Authority at COP26 last year is a precursor to more aggressive prosecutions for false or unfounded claims on sustainability.
This is based on existing law but makes it clear that firms making green claims “must not omit or hide important information” and “must consider the full life cycle of the product”.
Deceuninck has invested more the €15million in one of the world’s most advanced PVC-U recycling and compounding facilities.
This gives it the capability to reprocess up to 45,000 tonnes of post-consumer and post-manufacturing PVC-U per year – the equivalent of preventing 3million windows from going to landfill annually.
Use of recycled material also delivering a reduction in CO2 emissions of 90,000 tonnes compared to virgin feedstocks as well as a 90% energy saving.
“The PVC-U supply chain is comparatively short and most importantly, it’s transparent,” Rob continues. “Critically, it is recyclable. Each window can be recycled up to 10 times without degradation of performance.
“Given an average reference service life of around 35 years for each window, it means that the raw materials used in each product could still be making homes warmer and more energy efficient 350 years from now – as long as they are recovered and recycled.”
This is something he argues that the PVC-U industry has committed to drive forward. Deceuninck is one of a number of leading PVC-U window and door systems companies to have signed up to Vinyplus, a voluntary 10-year commitment to drive a circular economy in PVC-U manufacture.
“We know through figures from Vinylplus that collectively the industry has recycled more than 6.5million tonnes of PVC-U since 2000. That’s roughly 27.5% of the PVC-U ‘waste’ material that we could recycle, so we have more to do, but it is nonetheless a very significant figure.
“We expect the inflationary pressure that we’re now seeing on oil prices, to drive higher rates of recycling across Europe,” Rob says.
“But there’s also the commercial imperative, the fact that if you’re working in a commercial arena, main contractors have an expectation that you are using recycled material and that you’re minimising and recovering end of life material.”
Its own research also evidences just how important sustainability is to end-users with more than two-thirds of end-users (68%) stating that they would choose windows and doors with a higher recycled content over and above products that don’t contain recycled content, or which did so at lower levels.
The independent survey conducted by YouGov during COP26, also found that 63% of homeowners said that they would be more likely to purchase home improvements which they saw as being more ‘sustainable’. Of these, 38% would be prepared to pay more for home improvement products that had higher recycled content and reduced impact on the environment.
“What we have to do is get better at capturing that material and that requires a change in the way that we see it and in the way that specifications are drawn up to increase focus on not only whole-life costs but also end of product life and a circular value chain.”