Avantor’s supply chain is both complex and wide-reaching, comprising thousands of suppliers from around the world. Together, we have a responsibility to ensure this supply chain delivers for our customers while operating in a manner that effectively protects the environment and strengthens communities.

The Responsible Supplier Program is our approach to embedding sustainability practices throughout our supply chain and ensuring Avantor’s suppliers are well-positioned to meet the sustainability challenges of the future. Our program focuses on four priority sustainable sourcing topics and delivers against seven targets, as shown below.

1. Science-Based Targets initiative, 2. High-priority suppliers fall under any of the following classifications: high risk, high impact, strategic, 3. Suppliers that use more than 10,000 m3 of water annually, 4. Suppliers that place more than 50 tons of packaging on the marketplace annually, 5. Suppliers that produce more than 100 metric tons of waste annually.

We progress our priority sustainable sourcing topics and targets through the deployment of three activation pillars:

Performance pillar

Our objectives:

• Develop monitoring practices that enable Avantor to improve suppliers’ sustainability performance.
• Identify performance gaps and risks and implement management processes to mitigate and address these.
• Meet human rights and supply chain regulations monitoring requirements.
• Provide stakeholders with accessible data on Avantor’s responsible supply chain and be considered supplier of choice.

Our progress:

Avantor has developed its monitoring practices and is continuing to deploy them across its in-scope suppliers. 

We updated our Responsible Supply Chain Statements.

• Responsible Supplier Code of Conduct
• Environmental Sustainability Statement for Avantor Supply Chain
• Deforestation-Free Statement
• Responsible Packaging Statement
• Human Rights Statement for Avantor Supply Chain
• Ethics Helplines for Suppliers
• Conflict Minerals Statement
• Sustainability Performance Monitoring Practices for the Supply Chain

We developed and deployed our Sustainability Monitoring Practices for the Supply Chain.

We have measured our suppliers’ performance and shared our results. We obtained data on our priority sustainable sourcing topics for 31% of our suppliers by spend. We successfully assessed 32% of our suppliers by spend using their EcoVadis scorecard. In total, 45% of suppliers by spend participated in our Responsible Supplier Program in 2023. A summary of results has been shown below.

All percentages represent supplier spend against a total 2023 spend

Collaboration pillar

Our objectives:

• Develop a collaboration model that enables Avantor to collaborate effectively across multiple stakeholder groups to improve our leadership on sustainable sourcing and further supplier sustainability performance.
• Facilitate a partnership approach and lead on capacity building across the supply chain.
• Leverage collaboration efforts to identify innovative solutions to address sustainability gaps, risks and challenges.

Our progress:

Avantor has sponsored and joined various initiatives to champion sustainability progress in the supply chain. In 2024, we will invest in supplier capacity building to support the performance of our suppliers.

We actively participate in three industry initiatives to support the development of global solutions to improve sustainable sourcing practices.

	Avantor is a champion of the Sustainable Procurement Pledge (SPP). The SPP helps upskill and empower Procurement professionals to start their sustainable sourcing journey and be the change they want to see in the world. Avantor is highly committed to capacity building as a lever to accelerate sustainability in the supply chain and support our customers’ access to more sustainable products and services. Emma Howcroft, our Global Sourcing Sustainability Director, is also the co-chair of SPP’s Nature and Biodiversity chapter. This gives Emma the rewarding opportunity to help our global procurement community improve its nature maturity.
	Avantor is a contributor to the Scope 3 Peer Group, supporting the data and product footprint work streams. Through collaboration, this group helps procurement professionals make faster progress on reducing supply chain emissions.
	Avantor is a steering group member of the Nature and Biodiversity Peer Group and a founder of the Nature Steward Alliance. Both entities seek to improve nature acumen and action across the supply chain by focusing on better knowledge sharing and procurement and supplier capacity building. The groups joined forces in 2024. The Alliance is developing a toolkit to encourage supplier contributions to nature. Avantor has been running a small pilot with six sites to obtain action-based feedback for the toolkit.

We strongly believe in helping suppliers contribute to a sustainable future and have partnered with the Supplier Leadership on Climate Transition group to make climate change training available to our suppliers. This two-year sponsored training will help our suppliers measure their greenhouse gas emissions and develop their science-based targets for validation by the Science-Based Target initiative.

In addition to investing in climate change training, we are also building a Supplier Training Portal so suppliers can access resources and training quickly and feel empowered to start their sustainability journey. This will be particularly helpful for suppliers with limited access to resources or who are further behind on their sustainability journey.

Recognition pillar

Our objectives:

• Identify new innovative and sustainable suppliers in the marketplace.
• Promote suppliers who perform well on sustainability and incentivize others to follow.
• Recognize suppliers who perform well on sustainability in the VWR catalog.
• Award our top-performing and most collaborative suppliers and showcase their efforts.

Our progress:

We have now developed two awards within our Responsible Supplier Program and will be improving our day-to-day recognition of supplier sustainability progress. We awarded our Collaboration award in 2023 to Corning, Cytiva and Merck KGaA for their collaborative contributions to nature in 2022. We awarded our Performance award in 2024 to Elga Water Technologies and Ahlstrom for their sustainability performance in 2024. We expect to give out both awards simultaneously in the future.

We are continuing to improve the identification of our sustainable suppliers and ensure those that perform well are signposted clearly on our websites and catalogs.

How suppliers can get involved

If you have been categorized as an in-scope supplier, we’ll be in touch shortly about joining Avantor’s Responsible Supplier Program. In the meantime, please check out our one-pager, which explains how you can get started.

You can also access our Supplier Training Portal here. Get started by setting up a new account on Supplier Central.

Please email [email protected] should you have any questions or wish to receive further information about our Responsible Supplier Program.