Our ethical and environmental practices are important in embedding Corporate Responsibility in our supply chain management approach, and form part of a wider set of Supplier Policies.
Our ethical procurement policy is based on the standards adopted by the UN through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the ILO Conventions.
The standards we apply are as follows:
We expect all suppliers to comply with our policy and we reserve the right not to do business with companies where it can be demonstrated that significant violations of the policy exist. In particular we will not bring companies onto our supplier list where there is evidence of under age workers; forced, bonded or involuntary prison labour; or where the supplier’s workers are found to be subjected to potential life threatening working conditions or harsh or inhumane treatment.
Our approach with in-contract suppliers is to work together in a spirit of continuous improvement, but we do expect suppliers to enter into and commit to complete corrective action plans as a condition of their contract. We began a programme of ethical audits in 2004 with some of our existing and potential suppliers in South East Asia and Eastern Europe. As a direct result of these visits, a number of the companies have since developed their own ethical procurement policy. We will continue to develop our approach to auditing in line with industry standards and protocols. You can read about our audit policies within this section.
Our suppliers are expected to comply with all relevant local and national environmental regulations and we work with them to help minimise the effects of their activities.
Our environmental procurement policy supplements O2's internal efforts to help protect and sustain the environment, and is an integral part of our ISO14001 accredited Environmental Management System. Our aim is to drill our objectives for sustainable development deeper into the supply chain.
Suppliers will, as a minimum, be expected to:
During the period of any contract we expect the supplier to make all reasonable efforts to support initiatives or targets that O2 may from time to time introduce where the initiatives are relevant to their area of the O2 supply chain, e.g. Carbon foot print reduction targets.
Examples of where we work with suppliers range from sourcing recycled paper for all of our marketing material, through to energy saving initiatives with our major network equipment suppliers.
