Responsible Supplier Program

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 that 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 in bold in the table 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.

Our Responsible Supply Chain Statements provide Avantor suppliers with clear guidelines and expectations:

We advance 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:

In 2024, Avantor piloted a new supply chain transparency tool that allows us to proactively identify risks associated with our suppliers. We reviewed 149 suppliers, identified initial risk factors and are incorporating the findings into our overall Sustainability Monitoring Practices, outlined below:

In total, 55% of suppliers by spending participated in our Responsible Supplier Program in 2024.

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:

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 (SBTi).

To make these resources even more accessible, we have built 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 and those who are further behind on their sustainability journey.

Further strengthening our collaborative approach, Avantor contributes to the Scope 3 Peer Group, actively supporting data and product footprint initiatives. This forum unites procurement professionals across industries to share insights and accelerate progress on reducing supply chain emissions.

Together with our supplier partners and industry peers, we’re driving toward a more sustainable, lower-carbon future.

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
Award our top-performing and most collaborative suppliers and showcase their efforts

Our progress:

Avantor once again celebrated top-performing suppliers at our annual sales conferences in the Americas and Europe. Ansell and Ahlstrom were recognized for excellent collaboration, consistently strong EcoVadis scores and progress toward realizing our sustainable sourcing targets.

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

How suppliers can get involved

We continue to proactively engage in-scope suppliers in our Responsible Supplier Program.
Learn more by reviewing our supplier involvement guide or by visiting our Supplier Training Portal available on Supplier Central 

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