Electronics companies are linking up with telecoms businesses to
examine ways of working together on ethical supply chain management.
Signatories to the recently developed Electronics Industry Code of
Conduct, who are mainly North American and include Cisco, Dell, Hewlett
Packard, IBM and Microsoft, are working with the Global Sustainability
Initiative, most of whose participants are European companies – among
them BT, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, O2, Telefonica and Vodafone.
The two bodies have written a ‘supplier self-assessment questionnaire’
so that companies can complete assessments in a common format and are
developing a risk assessment tool to prioritize suppliers for audit.
The work should finish next year.
Claudia Kruse, senior analyst in governance and SRI at F&C Asset
Management, said the moves had the approval of many investors.
‘Industry collaboration is the most effective way to raise standards in
a way that avoids first-mover disadvantage‚’ she said.
