This time last year, my Stahl colleagues and I celebrated some exciting news as Stahl was awarded its first-ever Platinum EcoVadis rating. For those who may not be familiar, EcoVadis is a globally recognised, evidence-based rating platform that assesses the sustainability performance of more than 90,000 organisations against key criteria. And platinum is the highest rating EcoVadis offers – placing Stahl in the top 1% of all companies assessed worldwide. In 2023, we repeated this feat by retaining our Platinum rating for the second year in a row!
I have perhaps more reason than most to be pleased with our achievement. EcoVadis has been a constant focus for me since I joined Stahl as ESG Performance Manager back in 2017. We’d undertaken our first assessment a couple of years previously, at the encouragement of one of our suppliers, and received our first rating: a Bronze.
As my colleagues and I became more familiar with the EcoVadis approach, we began to better understand its value. Awards are always nice, but EcoVadis is about more than external recognition: it’s a tool to help businesses look at themselves objectively and get a clear sense of how they’re performing – or underperforming – on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics.
That’s because EcoVadis is based on a rigorous self-assessment process, which is externally validated by EcoVadis’ experts. Organizations are given a series of questions to answer relating to sustainability based on four key themes: Environment, Labour & Human Rights, Ethics and Sustainable Procurement. It adds up to many hundreds of questions – each of which can only be answered by providing hard evidence of tangible actions and results.
Undertaking an EcoVadis assessment is a lot of work, and to get the most out of the process, we knew we needed to fully commit to it. From two or three people working on the EcoVadis assessment each year, we quickly grew to become a team of seven. This included colleagues from different divisions across Stahl – Procurement, HR, ESG – using their specific expertise to help complete the assessment.
With this additional support, we were able to dedicate more time to gathering evidence. This meant the detail of the answers we provided to EcoVadis improved. And so did our rating: in 2017, we received our first ‘silver medal’ – and we retained our ranking during our next assessment in 2020.
In 2021, we swapped that for a ‘Gold’ rating – the all-important stepping-stone toward our Platinum award.
As you can see, we’ve improved our process in the past few years. But the process itself has also challenged us to improve as an organization. Because EcoVadis evaluates performance over time, you’re expected to show progress on the goals you’ve set. And while creating a new policy will earn you ‘brownie points’ in year one, you need to follow that up with concrete actions in year two, and tangible results in year three.
In 2023, the team and I worked hard to ensure that we built on our 2022 performance. The result of our efforts was a second consecutive Platinum rating. Not only that, but we managed to improve our EcoVadis performance by three points compared to the 2022 assessment – with an overall score of 80 out of 100.
One of the biggest areas of improvement was in the Labour & Human Rights category, where Stahl scored 90 out of a possible 100 points. This reflects, among other things, the work we've done over the past year to improve our health and safety management systems. The majority of Stahl's global manufacturing sites are now ISO 45001 certified and more than 94% are now ISO 14001 certified. In addition, we've taken steps to improve our approach to employee career development and well-being. These include the creation of an individual career plan for all employees and the introduction of a new company-wide employee satisfaction survey.
EcoVadis is now fully integrated into our ESG approach at Stahl. It’s even part of our Roadmap to 2030: we’ve set a target that, by 2030, all of our EcoVadis-rated suppliers need to have achieved a minimum rating of 45/100 before we’ll do business with them. This will ensure that Stahl only works with reputable suppliers, supporting our efforts to build a more responsible supply chain.
Reaching the Platinum level in the ratings in such a short space of time is a great achievement, but it’s not an excuse to be complacent. We may be in the top 1% of companies that are doing things right, but we know there are certain things that we could be doing better.
Over the coming years, we need to continue to identify and address those potential areas for improvement.
While we’ve already made great strides in reducing our environmental footprint, this remains a key priority for Stahl colleagues around the world. To this end, we’ve introduced new targets to reduce our Scope 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions which, together with our Scope 1 and 2 GHG targets, have recently been validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). Having set ourselves this challenge, it's important that we back up our ambitions with concrete actions and hard results.
The EcoVadis system is also designed to keep companies on their toes. The assessment takes into account global trends and ongoing changes in our environment. This means new criteria, such as our impact on biodiversity, are constantly being added. Remaining fully committed to the EcoVadis process is a key part of our ESG journey – it’s part of us becoming the kind of company we want to be. Learn more about our ESG journey in our 2022 ESG Report.
Learn all about EcoVadis or find out more about Stahl’s commitment to EcoVadis and ESG in our 2021 ESG report.