Sourcing

What is the Sourcing Pathway?

Raw materials are the foundation of products and businesses. However, the emissions from growing, harvesting, extracting and manufacturing these raw materials represent a major hotspot in the retail industry’s carbon footprint.

Fossil fuels themselves are also found in a wide range of products, from the oil-derived chemicals found in cleaning products, to ubiquitous plastics in synthetic clothing, consumer electronics and white goods.

Falling outside of a retailer's direct operations, product supply chains are complex and dynamic, and are influenced by a range of external factors such as geopolitics, local government policy, and even weather conditions. This makes addressing the climate impacts of raw materials particularly challenging for individual business, and so calls on the use of more collaborative approaches to effectively influence change.

The industry is ideally placed to facilitate the transformation of product supply chains through establishing circular design specifications and procedures for the sustainable sourcing of low-carbon raw materials.