No company becomes sustainable overnight. Individual people can be inspired in a moment to take action or to engage in the debate. But for a company as a whole, it is a long journey. Along the way it is useful to recall milestones that have been passed (please see above). And it is even more important to set targets for the future. To plot out the next steps on the road to sustainability.
Looking further ahead allows us to identify the key 'step changes' we need to make, rather than more incremental one-year targets. So we have a strategy for 2015 that has targets attached to it. For more than ten years we have been working with our suppliers to ensure they comply with our Workplace Standards. This experience allows us to set robust goals for 2015 in the social compliance area of our work.
Setting targets to improve our environmental performance across every link in our value chain is not so easy. In some areas, we are still carrying out assessments of the scale of our impact and understanding how we can reduce it. So some of our 2015 environmental targets will not be set until the end of 2010.
We have had a code of conduct for our suppliers to follow since 1997.