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USTAINABILITY remains a big goal for universities and their libraries. Most of them are doing what they can with the levers they control but
what can be done when it comes to their suppliers?
Jon Ray, Oxford University’s Gardens,
Libraries and Museums (GLAM) Environmental Sustainability Manager, was one of the speakers in the Green Procurement session of CILIP’s Green Libraries Conference 2025.
Jon showed that in 2023/24 a signifi- cant proportion of the carbon footprint related to things like buildings and fuel but said “the biggest single category is how we’re purchasing things. If we add procurement to retail it’s coming close to 50 per cent of our footprint.” He said this means: “The single most important thing that we could be focussed on is the sort of suppliers and the partners that we’re working with.” And he said that the proportion of an institution’s carbon footprint derived from the goods and services it buys in was likely to increase “because everyone talks about buildings and most people’s focus is on buildings – turn the lights off, and what energy are we using, that portion is shrinking, which means that the purchase spend portion is going to get bigger and bigger”.
Devil in detail
In his talk Jon explained the wide diversity of functions at the University with each one needing to be fully understood. For example he said: “In GLAM, we sell over 300,000 hot drinks a year and we are
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We set ourselves a goal, particularly on our carbon side, of wanting to align our spend with suppliers who are essentially carbon net zero.
Using buyer power to meet sustainability goals
How to assess and then influence the environmental footprint of your suppliers was explained by Jon Ray, Oxford University’s Gardens, Libraries and Museums (GLAM) Environmental Sustainability Manager, at the Green Libraries Conference.
starting to think about things like coffee that we sell, where’s that coffee grown? How’s it grown? Is it shaded coffee? Is it wet pro- cessed or dry processed? These things have a huge impact on the amount of water that’s used further down the supply chain.” He said the carbon footprint still mostly relates to physical material being bought in but “the digital side is becom- ing increasingly important”. Another variable is that while the University has a carbon footprint goal, it also looks at its harder-to-measure biodiversity footprint. “Here at the Bodleian Libraries we have two goals,” he said. “One is to be carbon net zero, so to reduce our footprint as much as possible by 2035. We also have a goal of biodiversity net gain by 2035.” And with the proportion of these foot- prints increasingly in purchasing, he adds: “Understanding what our suppliers are doing is really critical. We’re interested in what are our suppliers’ goals are, if they have a clear carbon reduction target and if we align to that?”
Assessment and alignment He said: “We set ourselves a goal, par- ticularly on our carbon side, of wanting to align our spend with suppliers who are essentially carbon net zero. So we started identifying who our top suppliers were and then going out to them to either see what they’re already talking about online or, if they are not saying anything, run- ning a survey to ask what are you doing. We asked about carbon and biodiversity, and we then used a very simple scoring mechanism to classify this.” But there are areas of contention like offsets and whether they should be fac-
Jon Ray.
tored in. He said that the university’s own policy is to buy no offsets before 2030, adding: “I have a degree of nervousness around organisations buying offsets, so we gave them a negative score, but that’s quite contentious and some people funda- mentally disagree with me.”
He said there were two key reasons for scoring suppliers: One to give an idea of how suppliers are doing now. Two, to give a sense of what suppliers need to do next. He showed how the scoring worked – not showing supplier names: “It gives a sense of what we’ve spent and our carbon score. It’s quite varied. We have plenty of suppliers who are doing nothing. We had some surprises who were making good progress.” Another challenge is resellers. “Some of our suppliers are resellers, and so they’re responding to our surveys on their own behalf. They’re not responding on what
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