Tavares Group Blog

Looking back at the Bangladesh Building Collapse – The Case for Embedding Sustainability into your Organization

On April 24th of this year the world watched as a building in Bangladesh was reduced to rubble and over 1000 garment factory workers were killed. Canada’s largest grocer, Loblaw Companies, which owns the Joe Fresh fashion label was among one of the speculated 40 clothing retailers who had employed one of the five garment production companies housed within the building. Unfortunately, incidents like these have become far too common for retailers subcontracting their work and it begs the question “could this disaster have been avoided?”. An indisputable portion of the blame has been placed upon the building owner, who had illegally constructed additional floors in the building, which housed thousands of workers, heavy power generators, and also ignored an engineer’s warning that the building was unsafe after large cracks had appeared in the foundation. While much of the blame lies with the building owner and factory managers, it cannot be ignored that retailers also hold responsibility in that they hired these garment factories to produce their goods.

Today, responsible sourcing of products and services is an integral component of sustainability and corporate social responsibility which should be ingrained within every corporation’s sustainability plan. Since the building collapse, Loblaw has signed on to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a comprehensive, multi-stakeholder initiative that aims to improve worker safety and better the Bangladeshi garment industry. The Company also promises to have its own people on the ground in Bangladesh who will report on compliance directly to the Company.

Unfortunately for Loblaw, it took one of the largest manufacturing disasters in recent history for meaningful changes to be made to their supplier requirements. However, other organizations can use this as a learning experience and recognize that proactively reviewing and adopting a process-based approach toward managing sustainability programs, rather than reactively establishing programs is best practice.

For many organizations, the implementation of operating practices such as human rights issues, ethics, occupational health & safety and other similar metrics in the context of sustainability programs is often seen as a difficult process whether it be due to a lack of guidance, manpower or budget. Often, utilizing a management system approach to address environmental, health & safety requirements allows organizations to understand and manage their impacts, risks, opportunities and legal obligations related to sustainability and to continually improve their performance. This is just what Tavares Group Consulting and Kuzuka Ltd. addressed during the development of the Sustainability Toolkit- A Practical Guide to Integration, an innovative new tool to help organizations implement sustainability initiatives. The Toolkit identifies sustainability criteria, such as Operating Practices, and related metrics and indicators which are commonly reported on through the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The Toolkit includes an Action Plan and Assessment Tool which assists organizations manage and track their sustainability initiatives through thirteen steps of implementation and to continually improve upon their projects through three phases (Level A, Level AA and Level AAA) to become leaders in sustainability by pushing their requirements out to their supply chain.

Interested parties are invited to attend the Toolkit’s introductory webinar. For more information, click here. Also, registration for the Sustainability Toolkit: A Practical Guide To Integration 4 week online course will be open soon. To request more information about the Toolkit, please contact us.