Earth Day, Sustainable Targets & Progress

Earth Day – Where we’re going and our progress so far.

Dodds & Shute’s mission is design responsibly sourced, and on Earth Day we took time to reflect what this means to us, where we want to take this and how we’re doing so far. We believe that measuring and monitoring where we are today and staying focused on defined future targets is the best way to ensure progress.

We are in business to instigate real change in the design sector. To us this means truly understanding the impacts of our supply chain and working to both improve the quality of the products we spec and as well as educate our clients to empower them to make better choices. As we work with over 100 suppliers and therefore many thousands of products, this is not a small undertaking!

In 2017, we set a target to become carbon neutral, not just for our operations, but for our supply chain. The first step was to measure our impacts, and the impacts of the products that we supply. Read more about how we did this here. Armed with this data, we have since been focusing on addressing and mitigating our climate impact. We are proud that since 2018, we have been carbon neutral for scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions - in fact climate positive, as we offset 10% more than our footprint.

As the next step from here, we began extensive research into the wider impacts of our supply chain, through our supplier audit. Read more about our approach and results here. Analysis of the data we’ve collected shows that the current average score of suppliers is currently 64%. We have a target to increase this score annually, both by working with our manufacturers to improve their practices, but also by shifting our supply chain to work with more sustainable manufacturers. In fact, we have a target to hit a minimum of 25% of sales with sustainable manufacturers (assessed as receiving above 70% on our audit) each year and to increase this percentage annually to be 90% by 2030. This will take a huge amount of work over the next decade, but for now we are roughly on track for meeting our near-term target of 25%.

In addition to environmental aspects, we’ve had a long-standing target to donate at least 0.5% of profit to charitable causes – you can see some of the organisations we’ve donated to here.

While we are proud of where we’ve come to date, we know there is always so much more to do and are driven by this knowledge. Therefore, we are delighted to have just hired a Head of Sustainability, Lucy Arndt, who has over a decade of experience in working with companies to address sustainability and climate risks and opportunities, within oil and gas and other extractives, aviation, beauty and more. With her on board, in the coming months, we will be formalising and sharing more details about the work that we are doing and plan to continue to do in the coming years.

We couldn’t achieve any of this without the hard work and innovations of our suppliers, and of course the decisions and passion of our clients. Together, we believe we can make a real difference, and, most importantly, to keep all of this at the centre of our business every day, not just on Earth Day.