24 Jun 2026

Decarbonising Supply Chains for Business and Innovation

Decarbonising Supply Chains for Business and Innovation
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🏠 | Blog | Decarbonising Supply Chains for Business and Innovation

 

Quick Read Summary

Supply chain decarbonisation has narrowed to two options: exclude suppliers who cannot meet your requirements, or engage them until they can. This Reset Connect London 2026 panel argued for engagement, and set out what it costs, who pays and why mandates alone fail when your supplier is bigger than you are.

The urgency is arithmetic. Upstream scope 3 accounts for around 72 per cent of the average corporate footprint and 98 per cent of the NHS impact, so an organisation that has decarbonised only its own operations has barely started. Buyers are now writing requirements into tenders, which turns supplier emissions data into a commercial asset.

You will come away with the ladder the NHS uses to raise supplier expectations without excluding smaller firms, a worked example of collective supplier pressure succeeding where a single request failed, and the practical advice the panel gave for starting next week with imperfect data.

 

The Choice Has Narrowed to Excluding Suppliers or Engaging Them

Shana Gallagher, Net Zero Engagement Manager at the British Standards Institution, opened with the framing the panel had settled on beforehand. Supply chain decarbonisation now comes down to exclude or engage, with a great deal of nuance inside that choice.

The numbers explain why it cannot be avoided. Tanguy Robert, Co-Founder of Sami, said that across the platform’s 1,500 clients, upstream scope 3 averages around 72 per cent of the total carbon footprint. Heidi Barnard, Head of Sustainability at NHS Supply Chain, put her organisation’s figure at 98 per cent, which follows from what it does: procuring around 650,000 products and delivering them into trusts, community settings and increasingly to patients’ homes.

The NHS approach is a demand signal held steady over years. The NHS England supplier roadmap set out the route in advance so suppliers could prepare, and the Evergreen assessment has four levels. It began by asking only that suppliers register and complete it. From April this year every supplier must reach level one, and guidance for the 2027 milestone now requires reporting across all relevant scope 3 categories rather than a subset.

The pattern is copyable. Publish the trajectory, hold it, resource the support and raise the bar on a published schedule.

Smaller Suppliers Are Not the Weak Link, but Their Leverage Runs Backwards

Barnard pushed back on the premise that raising standards squeezes out smaller firms. Some of the most engaged, agile and capable suppliers in the NHS catalogue are SMEs, and she was direct that "we need to be really mindful about not making assumptions about what an SME is and isn’t capable of".

The genuine difficulty is structural. Robert described the reversal that catches smaller businesses: they are asked for data by large customers, then have to decarbonise their own supply chain while representing perhaps one per cent of a supplier’s revenue. A request that carries weight coming from a multinational carries almost none coming from them.

His worked example was a French sports clothing company with revenues of around 50 million euros, whose production sits mostly in Asia. It asked its largest supplier to move to solar and was turned down. It then approached other textile companies using the same supplier and returned as a group of four, including one large buyer. The supplier implemented the change.

This reframes what a smaller buyer should do first. The lever is not a better letter to the supplier. It is finding the other customers who want the same thing.

In Construction, No Environmental Product Declaration Means No Tender

Andrew Cowan, UK and Ireland Team Lead at One Click LCA, described a sector where this is already settled. An environmental product declaration, or EPD, is a standardised disclosure of a product’s life cycle impacts, built on the EN 15804+A2 standard. Cowan compared it to nutritional information for a building product.

Buyers now write EPDs into tenders. He described a manufacturer that came to One Click LCA after competing for a million-pound project against a rival that held an EPD when it did not: "no EPD, no chance at a million-pound contract". BREEAM, a building certification scheme in use for around 30 years, increasingly requires them too, and a supplier without one drops off the list before the conversation starts.

The direction of travel is clear from the manufacturers who moved early. One lighting manufacturer outsourced a single EPD four years ago, brought the work in-house and now holds over 200. Cowan expects comparable data to become standard across UK construction within five to 10 years, with EU digital product passports under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation pushing in the same direction.

Product-level disclosure has already crossed the line separating good practice from market access in at least one major sector.

Liverpool FC Is Spending Its Influence Where It Actually Has Some

Rishi Jain, Director of Impact at Liverpool Football Club, was candid that the club is earlier in this work than the NHS. It has around 4,000 suppliers, ranging across a community bakery in the shadow of the stadium, a pasty supplier employing serving prisoners and ex-offenders, and construction firms delivering a stadium expansion to 61,000 seats.

The club started by contacting its top 25 per cent of suppliers by spend and asking what targets they held. Around 52 per cent came back positively, and several turned out to be doing more than the club knew. Jain was equally honest about the emissions that come with success: merchandise emissions rose 67 per cent in the last reporting period, because the season it covered was the one Liverpool won the Premier League.

Where the club has direct influence, it has used it, switching the team buses to HVO fuel and buying sustainable aviation fuel for domestic flights. The commercial return has surprised him. Partners now approach the club asking to be part of the Red Way, its sustainability programme, which is not a sentence sustainability leads often get to say to a chief commercial officer.

It's a realistic model for organisations without procurement leverage. Start with the categories you genuinely control and make the results visible.

The Cost Question Is Really a Risk Question

When asked where the financial burden falls, the panel agreed it has to be shared, and disagreed usefully on how. Jain ruled out issuing demands his suppliers could meet only at a cost his finance director would reject. Barnard, working in public procurement, said offsetting is not on the table at all: reduction comes first.

Her sharper argument was about the cost of inaction. A supplier not managing its emissions is a supplier carrying more risk, and disruption costs more than decarbonisation would have. She pointed to the heatwave running during the event, and to the London Ambulance Service handling over 7,000 calls a day, above its normal peak.

Robert drew a distinction worth keeping: engaging a supply chain and decarbonising one have different price tags. Large buyers can offer suppliers discounted platform access or tailored guidance at little cash cost, then co-fund specific projects with a small number of targeted suppliers. Cowan added the built environment’s experience of mandating EPDs down the chain, where manufacturers absorb the cost initially and tend to price it back into their tenders.

This moves the conversation out of the sustainability budget. Positioned as cost to serve and supply continuity, it competes for money on the same terms as any other risk.

The Barrier Is Language, and Collaboration Is Still Undersold

Barnard cited a King’s Fund report examining attitudes to the NHS net zero programme broken down by political alignment. Voters on the right reacted strongly against the terms net zero and climate change, and supported the same measures when they were described as reducing waste and using resources efficiently. Her conclusion: "it’s not a culture and behaviour problem. It is a language and how we talk to people problem."

The panel’s other consistent theme was that collaboration is undervalued because leaders fear losing their lead. Robert argued the opposite: "you will remain a leader even if you’re bringing on your competitors in the initiative." Cowan pointed to construction manufacturers producing shared association EPDs despite competing hard everywhere else, and Jain described Premier League clubs sharing practice under a collective sustainability commitment while competing fiercely on the pitch.

Barnard also made the case for looking past the individual product. In healthcare, a glove is used with a suture and a dressing in a theatre environment, so the unit that matters is the care pathway rather than the item.

Both barriers are cheap to address. Changing the words costs nothing, and joining an existing industry initiative costs less than building one.

 

Practical Application: How to Start Cutting Supply Chain Emissions With Imperfect Data

When asked what a business could do next week without complete data, the panel converged on the same answer. Start where you are, and stop waiting for the data to improve first.

Questions to ask

  • What are we procuring next week, and could we buy less of it, a better version of it, or something different entirely?
  • Which single product carries the most carbon, and have we asked that supplier what data they already hold?
  • Who else buys from our most important supplier, and would they join a shared request?

Signals to watch

  • Product-level disclosure requirements appearing in tenders outside construction
  • Buyers publishing multi-year supplier roadmaps and holding to them
  • Industry associations producing shared standards rather than each buyer writing their own

Traps to avoid

  • Waiting for a complete data set before opening a conversation with suppliers
  • Assuming smaller suppliers are less capable than larger ones
  • Sending an annual data request and calling it supplier engagement

What good looks like is unglamorous. A published trajectory, support attached to every requirement, and a first conversation with the supplier behind your most carbon-intensive purchase, held this month rather than after the next reporting cycle.\

 

 

Key Takeaways

Five organisations at very different stages described the same shift. Supplier emissions data has become a condition of doing business, and the organisations making progress are the ones treating suppliers as partners to be resourced rather than as a compliance risk to be screened.

  • Upstream scope 3 averages around 72 per cent of a corporate carbon footprint, and 98 per cent of the NHS Supply Chain impact
  • The NHS raises its supplier bar on a published schedule, requiring level one on the Evergreen assessment from April this year and full scope 3 reporting from the 2027 milestone
  • A supplier request that fails from one small customer can succeed when several customers make it together
  • In UK construction, a manufacturer without an environmental product declaration is already excluded from major tenders
  • Framing decarbonisation as waste reduction and resource efficiency wins support from audiences that reject the language of net zero.                       

 

 

Quote of the Session

"No EPD, no chance at a million-pound contract"

Andrew Cowan, UK and Ireland Team Lead, One Click LCA

 

 

Final Thoughts

The useful thing about this panel was the range of maturity on it. A public buyer with 650,000 product lines, a football club with 4,000 suppliers and two platforms watching thousands of companies attempt the same work all described the same bottleneck, and none of them described it as ambition.

What is at stake is whether supplier engagement stays a reporting exercise or becomes a working relationship. The evidence presented pointed one way: requirements without support produce data of little value, and collective requests achieve what individual ones cannot. That is a less comfortable conclusion for buyers, because it means the work does not end with sending the questionnaire.

 

 

Speakers

Shana Gallagher, Net Zero Engagement Manager - British Standards Institution (moderator). Shana leads private sector engagement for BSI’s sustainability standards and shepherds development of the ISO net zero standard. She holds a masters in sustainable finance and spent a decade in US politics and advocacy.

Rishi Jain, Director of Impact - Liverpool Football Club. Rishi leads the Red Way, the club’s sustainability and social impact programme, and has 20 years of experience in the sport industry including roles at Manchester United, Kick It Out and The FA.

Heidi Barnard, Head of Sustainability - NHS Supply Chain. Heidi has over 20 years of experience driving environmental strategy across manufacturing, construction and healthcare, and leads strategic programmes supporting the NHS net zero, scope 3 and social value agenda.

Tanguy Robert, Co-Founder - Sami. Tanguy co-founded Sami, a carbon and ESG management platform supporting more than 1,500 clients to measure and reduce their carbon footprints, with a particular focus on scope 3 and supply chain emissions.

Andrew Cowan, UK and Ireland Team Lead - One Click LCA. Andrew has over 15 years of leadership experience in construction and real estate, working with contractors, developers, manufacturers and portfolio owners on environmental performance and supplier data.

 

 

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