This week, the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC), a nonprofit coalition of many of the world’s largest leading electronics companies — including Apple, Cisco, Dell, Eastman Kodak, HP, Microsoft and many more — dedicated to supply chain responsibility, and CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) announced a new partnership to help expand greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting and reductions in the electronics supply chain. The EICC is the first industry group to partner with CDP’s supply chain program.
The EICC will collaborate with CDP to encourage electronics companies to disclose their GHG emissions through CDP’s supply chain program, which is designed to guide companies to achieve their environmental potential. This is an opportunity for EICC members to pilot a GHG initiative that can help them measure and look for ways to reduce emissions, while enabling the Coalition to drive GHG reporting further down the supply chain. All submitted data is independently assessed against CDP’s respected scoring methodology, and CDP scores enable benchmarking and easy identification of best practices in corporate climate leadership.
“Through this partnership with CDP, we aim to have more electronics suppliers reporting on greenhouse gas emissions than ever before, develop the strongest supply chain GHG emissions mapping of any industry, and help our members with their own supplier benchmarking and reporting so they can drive cost-effective GHG reductions,” said EICC executive director Rob Lederer.
The initial reporting cycle will start on April 1 and will be completed by July 31, 2015. Following this period, the EICC and CDP plan to publish joint reports on industry trends in GHG reporting and help EICC members develop product supply chain GHG inventories.
“In the past year, suppliers reported 3.5 million metric tons of carbon reductions directly as a result of customer engagement through our program. We look forward to working with the EICC, which is the leading supply chain CSR organization in the electronics industry, to help its members reduce their supply chain greenhouse gas emissions and to develop data-driven insights for the industry,” said Dexter Galvin, Head of CDP’s Supply Chain Program.
Last year the EICC reaffirmed its commitment to reducing energy consumption and GHG emissions in supply chains by including GHG reporting and reduction in its updated Code of Conduct and Validated Audit Protocol (VAP), which go into effect on April 1, 2015. The EICC Environmental Sustainability Work Group (ESWG) has made GHG emissions one of its priority issues for 2015, and the group plans to offer a number of programs and tools to help EICC members and suppliers learn more about the issue, develop GHG emissions inventories, and begin looking for cost-effective ways to reduce energy consumption and GHG emissions.
CDP has been working for 14 years to move the issues of climate change and energy efficiency onto boardroom agendas and into mainstream business, purchasing and investment strategies. Since pioneering its global natural capital disclosure system, CDP has driven organizations and cities around the world to understand and act on the business case for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and moving to cleaner energy sources.
The EICC is also working to improve the social side of the electronics supply chain: The Coalition, which has been working for more than a decade to support the wellbeing of workers and communities affected by the global electronics supply chain, announced last month that it will conduct shadow audits and increase its industry and government engagement in Malaysia to further combat forced labor.
Also last month, CDP released its Supply chain report 2014–15— its most comprehensive overview of the climate risks and opportunities that exist for supply chains globally. The research is based on data collected from 3,396 companies on behalf of 66 multinational member companies accounting for $1.3 trillion in procurement spend that work with CDP to better understand and manage the environmental impacts of their supply chains.