UNSW launched its Sustainable Procurement Vision 2018-2025, aimed at delivering outstanding environmental, social and economic benefits to UNSW students, staff and community through understanding and strengthening UNSW supply chains.
The Strategic Procurement team is at the forefront of this vision and strives to be leaders of excellence within the higher education sector. Due to the various terminology challenges across industry, the Strategic Procurement team is adopting ‘Sustainable Procurement’ as the consistent term, to be used to describe all Sub Principles. Sub Principles include: Human Rights, Modern Slavery, Gender equality, Health & Safety, Environmental, Equity, diversity and inclusion and Carbon, Energy, Water, Waste.
To ensure that sufficient attention and positive impact is made against each of these Sub Principles, Procurement intend to focus on two of these within 2020. It is intended that Procurement will focus their attention on two a year. This allows for sufficient impact, actions and outcomes to be integration into business as usual for the following year.
For 2020-2022 Procurement is dedicated to three key themes. These being:
- Addressing Modern Slavery across UNSW's Supply Chains;
- Supplier Diversity and Inclusion; and
- Emission Reduction (Net Zero Strategy).
This will allow for actions to be set for each quarter of the year, accompanied by the appropriate governance and a strong stakeholder group to assist with the execution of actions.
Besides these themes having a Focus Plan, the procurement team continue to partner with Estate Management's Sustainability team as well as identify sustainable procurement opportunities each time an activity is sent to suppliers.
