SUSTAINABILITY
How to support suppliers with net zero
Hannah Dales, Head of Environment at Churchill Group, explores the challenges of measuring Scope 3 emissions in the FM and cleaning sectors, and shares advice on how firms can support suppliers on the net zero journey.
For most cleaning and FM businesses, the bulk of the carbon footprint isn’t found in their own operations, but with their suppliers. Scope 3 emissions typically make up more than 70% of a business’s footprint, according to the UN Global Compact UK.
Those supply chains are made up overwhelmingly of small firms. SMEs account for 99.9% of UK businesses, and most have no sustainability lead, no carbon calculator and little spare time to build either. Yet if you are serious about net zero, this is precisely the group you must reach.
Why asking for data isn’t enough
When Scope 3 data is needed, the instinct is simply to ask for it: issue the questionnaire, set a deadline and chase whoever fails to reply. However, that request lands very differently on a 12-person cleaning contractor than on a large managed-service provider with its own ESG team.
If a supplier has no way of measuring its own emissions, asking for the figures tends to achieve very little. Smaller suppliers need their FM partners to engage proactively, giving them the tools and the confidence to do the measuring themselves, rather than assuming they already can.
A free platform, built around suppliers
That thinking shaped the supplier resource hub we built at Churchill Group alongside sustainability consultancy Acclaro Advisory, after a six-month research phase which examined how ready suppliers were and how reliable the data coming back actually was.
The result is a free digital platform that brings together a greenhouse gas calculator, a target-setting tool and reduction guidance, all underpinned by GHG Protocol methodologies so the numbers stay consistent across the chain. Cost and complexity were the two barriers our research kept surfacing, so the hub costs nothing to use and is deliberately stripped of jargon, designed around the real problems suppliers face.
Behind the platform sit in-person workshops, webinars and one-to-one sessions, where our environmental and procurement teams help suppliers input the right data and make sense of the results. It takes longer than firing over a link, but it builds lasting capability.
Focus on where emissions are
You cannot reach a thousand suppliers at once, and there’s no need to. We segment ours by spend, by how material their emissions are, and by whether they already hold
32 | TOMORROW'S CLEANING Results, and the lesson for cleaning
The results speak for themselves. Having engaged suppliers responsible for 32% of our supply chain emissions, the proportion of our supplier emissions covered by targets aligned to or validated by the SBTi has climbed from 48.1% in FY23/24 to 70.6%, also as a result of broader progress in mapping and engaging our supply chain.
The programme has now reached its second round, and this year it has been shortlisted for Supply Chain Project of the Year at the UK Green Business Awards, and Supply Chain Sustainability Project of the Year at the edie Awards.
For a cleaning sector defined by long, fragmented and SME- heavy supply chains, the takeaway is simple. You will not decarbonise by offloading the burden onto suppliers who lack the means to carry it, nor reach net zero by looking only at your own operations.
You need your supply chain, so bring it with you. Businesses which treat supplier decarbonisation as something to support rather than demand will move faster on their own Scope 3 emissions, and build a stronger, more resilient supply chain in doing so.
www.churchillservices.com
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targets aligned with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). Roughly 100 suppliers account for almost half of our in-scope emissions, so that’s where the work starts.
For any cleaning or FM business, the first move is to map the chain and rank suppliers by their emissions impact. Avoid the temptation to treat every supplier the same.
“You will not decarbonise by
offloading the burden onto suppliers who lack the means to carry it.”
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