Emma Howcroft is the Global Sourcing Sustainability Director of Avantor Sciences, a life sciences company focusing on biopharma lab consumables and chemicals. Emma is in charge of launching Avantor’s new Responsible Suppliers Program, with the goal to accelerate sustainability within the company’s external supply chain. In this video, she shares some of the successes and pitfalls that she is experiencing as she develops the Responsible Suppliers Program.

 

What Is Covered:  

 

• How Avantor approaches sustainability goals and where they are on their sustainability journey
• Launching visionary targets vs. using tried and tested methods and why Avantor opted for the latter
• Responsible Suppliers Program focuses on training and education in order to come up with standardised indicators across the supply chain rather than focusing on compliance  
• The difficulties with finding the right tools to monitor and measure Scope 3 emissions, and how Avantor responds to this by setting science-based targets
• The importance of concerning human rights across the supply chain – monitoring and measuring should not be done for its own sake but should drive actual change  
• Key areas of Avantor’s Responsible Suppliers Program: reducing carbon emission, increasing biodiversity, setting waste and packaging standards, advancing human rights
• Training and education is crucial to translating sustainability targets into your company department 
• Why there’s a huge need to be empathetic towards the suppliers across the entire global supply chain and how to onboard them onto the sustainability journey
• The role of technology and automation in simplifying the Responsible Suppliers Program for sourcing teams   

 

Resources:

• Learn more about Avantor’s Responsible Suppliers Program:  https://www.avantorsciences.com/pages/en/responsible-supplier-program 
• Avantor Sciences:  https://www.avantorsciences.com/site/