To reduce costs and waste, streamline efficiencies, and increase our competitiveness, we have been taking steps to integrate responsible and ethical business practices into our supply chain.

As a subsidiary of Newell Brands, our suppliers and product manufacturers must abide by its Vendor Code of Conduct, which outlines expectations for human rights, labor requirements, health and safety, environmental compliance, and management practices. Violations of the code may result in corrective action, including termination of our business relationship.

We outsource manufacturing to factories in Asia and the U.S., which must comply with local labor and environmental regulations, as well as our requirements for anti-corruption, bribery, and conflicts of interest. At least annually, we evaluate suppliers by auditing their operations, quality of materials, labor practices and dormitories, and record of compliance. We are happy to report that our audits showed that our suppliers have maintained high scores across all categories.

In 2017, we introduced a performance scorecard that includes sustainability criteria, such as natural resource consumption, energy and material management, and measurement of greenhouse gas emissions. Our expectation is that our suppliers operate beyond local requirements and take additional steps to reduce their impacts. We were pleased to see one supplier switch from using coal to natural gas as its primary energy source and look forward to additional suppliers making the move away from coal in 2018. While we certainly urge our suppliers to pursue renewable energy options, we think the move from coal to natural gas is a step in the right direction.

In the coming year, we will support others pursuing clean energy alternatives, continue tracking progress, and address performance gaps using the new supplier scorecard as the catalyst for these improvements.

Diversifying our value chain

Incorporating diverse experiences, work styles, thoughts, and ideas into our business will only strengthen our company. Our participation in the B Corp’s Inclusion Challenge, as well as inquiries from our industry partners, led us to examine how much business we were doing with minority and women-owned enterprises. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that about 8% of our annual spending with significant suppliers is with a woman-owned business. We began this assessment this year and plan to examine this annually.