Human rights and environmental considerations will be combined in a new
overall CSR procurement policy being announced this year by the
National Australia Bank.
The bank says in its latest CSR report that it aims to have regional
procedures for implementing the new policy and will train its
procurement specialists in CSR to back this up. It says it will educate
its suppliers on its CSR policy and will improve its systems for
monitoring its suppliers’ CSR performance.
At the same time it will work with the Australian Research Institute of
Education for Sustainability, with which it has started a 12-month
project on CSR implementation in its supply chain.
The report records that during the past year the bank’s environmental
policy for non-IT procurement, which was applied to the Australian
region, was extended to cover the whole group. It reports that it now
has category and vendor specialists for managing relationships with key
suppliers and there is a schedule for conducting regular evaluations
and risk and financial assessments of them.
The past 12 months have seen a project in Australia, carried out with
United Group Services, to improve methods of logging consumption of
resources and energy. The two organizations have worked on developing a
tender for centrally managed waste services. The aim is to enable the
bank to measure its waste and bring in waste reduction measures.
The bank says a ‘key initiative’ last year was a Green Procurement
Forum, which it hosted with Telstra and Qantas, to share best practice
with its customers, suppliers and other organizations.
Activities have not been all one-way – the bank is continuing to ask
suppliers how they view it. In the UK the procurement team invites
suppliers to score the bank on its supply chain performance.
