Arkema becomes the ninth member of the TfS initiative, founded in 2011 by BASF, Bayer, Evonik Industries, Henkel, Lanxess and Solvay. The initiative has been built over sustainability best practices, principles to which Arkema adheres such as United Nations Global Compact and the Responsible Care® global charter as well as established standards like International Standard Organization (ISO), International Labor Organization (ILO) and many others. “Promoting responsible growth through sustainable chemistry is our vision.
This obviously applies to all the Group activities worldwide. In that respect, Arkema confirms its commitment to sustainability in procurement enhancing with TfS its supplier selection process” specifies Gérard Langlais, Arkema Sustainable Development Vice-President. A collaborative platform to improve CSR performance The goal of Together for Sustainability is to develop and to implement a global assessment and audit program to evaluate and improve sustainability practices in chemical industry supply chain.
For this purpose, TfS members involve EcoVadis, a company specialized in CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) performance assessment, to measure the commitment of their registered suppliers. Independent audit companies are also conducting supplier audits on many criteria aiming at improving sustainability practices. “The value of this approach is to share assessments and audits results between all TfS members on a web-based platform, instead of doing all of them separately on our own. Therefore it relieves both suppliers and customers from redundant audit workload. The platform is also a very convenient way to highlight CSR best practices” emphasizes Louis Schmidtlin, Goods and Services Procurement Vice-President.