What are the material issues the company has identified? 

In its 2020 Sustainability Report Synthomer identified a range of material issues, such as ethics and integrity, occupational health and safety, energy management and reduction, process safety. Among these, promoting sustainability among its suppliers stands out as a key material issue for Synthomer.

Stakeholder engagement in accordance with the GRI Standards              

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) defines the Principle of Stakeholder Inclusiveness when identifying material issues (or a company’s most important impacts) as follows:

“The reporting organization shall identify its stakeholders, and explain how it has responded to their reasonable expectations and interests.”

Stakeholders must be consulted in the process of identifying a company’s most important impacts and their reasonable expectations and interests must be taken into account. This is an important cornerstone for CSR / sustainability reporting done responsibly.

Key stakeholder groups Synthomer engages with:  

Stakeholder Group

Customers

Employees

Suppliers

Shareholders

Legislators

Authorities

Local communities

How stakeholder engagement was made to identify material issues

To identify and prioritise material topics Synthomer engaged with its stakeholders through an online survey designed to collect stakeholders’ feedback, submitted to nearly 400 individuals across all the geographic regions where Synthomer operates.

What actions were taken by Synthomer to promote sustainability among its suppliers?

In its 2020 Sustainability Report Synthomer reports that it took the following actions for promoting sustainability among its suppliers:

• Conducting risk assessments
• In 2020, a risk assessment using external specialists was conducted by Synthomer across eight spend areas and seven environmental and social risk areas. The risk areas were identified following a structured approach of embedded risk, industry mitigation factors and supplier mitigation factors. Overall, the environmental and social risks within Synthomer’s supply chain are relatively low due to high levels of mitigation (regulation, audits, voluntary action) that are already taken across the industry sector and by Synthomer’s largest suppliers. The highest risk areas identified were carbon emissions and energy use, waste generation and management within the monomer supply chain. The latter is so for many reasons, including accounting for a high proportion of Synthomer’s spend and being core to the business. Logistics is also a high risk due to carbon emissions, predominantly through the use of large goods vehicles. This identification of the main sustainability risks is being integrated into existing risk governance processes. The governance process is also being enriched with a full supplier-level risk scanning tool and sustainability ratings.

• Assessing suppliers’ performance
• Before a vendor is on-boarded and approved as a trading partner, Synthomer employs standardised assessment processes. A periodic review of key suppliers is carried out to assess performance of the supplier against criteria covering technical support, commercial performance, reputation including REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals) and local regulatory compliance. The final target in Synthomer’s Sustainable Procurement Strategy is audit and assessment against its minimum standards.

Which GRI Standards and corresponding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been addressed?

The GRI Standards addressed in this case are:

1) Disclosure 308-1 New suppliers that were screened using environmental criteria

2) Disclosure 414-1 New suppliers that were screened using social criteria

 

Disclosure 308-1 New suppliers that were screened using environmental criteria does not correspond to any SDG.

Disclosure 414-1 New suppliers that were screened using social criteria corresponds to:

• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5: Gender Equality
• Targets: 5.2
• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
• Targets: 8.8
• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
• Targets: 16.1

 

78% of the world’s 250 largest companies report in accordance with the GRI Standards

SustainCase was primarily created to demonstrate, through case studies, the importance of dealing with a company’s most important impacts in a structured way, with use of the GRI Standards. To show how today’s best-run companies are achieving economic, social and environmental success – and how you can too.

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References:

This case study is based on published information by Synthomer, located at the link below. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses. However, we made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the report’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original please revert to the following link:

https://www.synthomer.com/fileadmin/files/company/sustainability_2021/Synthomer plc_Sustainability Report 2020.pdf

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