Environmental procurement

O2 works with a great number of local and international suppliers. The goods and services they supply include network infrastructure, mobile devices, IT hardware and software, and branded clothing and merchandise.

One of many challenges for our buyers is to ensure that our relationships support our own activities as an environmentally conscientious business.

We have a Group-wide Environmental Procurement Policy to help us source products in the most responsible way and to spread best practice throughout our supply chain.

We work very closely with all suppliers whose businesses are environmentally significant and we try to help them minimise the impact of their operations.

Our aim is to ensure that their practices mirror ours in terms of safeguarding the world’s resources - and we encourage them to see this as a competitive advantage.

We do this by:

• implementing our Environmental Procurement policy

• working collaboratively with our suppliers.

We benchmark our suppliers against ISO14001 standards and expect them to comply with local and national environmental regulations. We focus on supply chains that display the greatest potential risk and on areas where we believe we can make a real difference.

To raise awareness and to satisfy ourselves of best practice, we distribute a self-assessment questionnaire to suppliers and we insist on a response. We also ask them to answer any further verification queries openly.

In addition, our Ethical Procurement policy deals with human rights and working conditions as an integral part of our supplier relationship and procurement policies.

We conduct procurement audits as far afield as China and Taiwan and we expect our suppliers to verify that their supply chains – to which we are not connected directly  - comply with our own ethical and environmental standards.