Sustainable Procurement at McGill
Forthcoming strategic planning exercise for Sustainable Procurement
2020-2025
Procurement Services is proudly wrapping up the implementation of its first Sustainable Procurement Strategic Plan (2013-2018). The team is now looking forward to embark on another round of planning to identify its priority actions and projects for 2020-2025.
Looking back through 2013 to 2018, here are some noteworthy accomplishments
- All Procurement Services Staff received a customized 6 hour training workshop helping them to apply lifecycle thinking in their work and understanding the social and environmental impacts of McGill’s supply chain. This training has now been adapted and made available to all McGill faculty members and staff through Organisational Development (OD).
- A Supplier Code of Conduct detailing McGill’s minimal requirements for engaging in business activities with its suppliers was developed and is now integrated to the University’s contracts.
- Social and environmental criteria have been developed and applied to University calls for tenders on an ongoing basis.
- 10 groups of students from the School of Environment, the Desautels Faculty of Management, the Faculty of Education and Faculty of Engineering have collaborated on Applied Student Research projects pertaining to Sustainable Procurement at McGill.
- The lifecycle management of administrative IT equipment has been improved, with an internal reuse loop and external reuse loop, paving the way to more circular material flows at the University.
- New collaborations were developed with local social economy enterprises.
- Several phases of the greater Asset Management program have been completed in order to support optimization of the lifecycle of the University’s assets, following circular economy principles.
- McGill University’s ranking for Sustainable Procurement under the AASHE Stars system was 2nd in the world and first in Canada, for the 2017 reporting year.
“These are no small achievements” says François Pouliot, Director of Procurement Services. “Our actions are inspiring similar initiatives across Canada and our team is gladly sharing its experience with other institutions and organisations. Much of these projects are still ongoing and require constant monitoring and reporting, but in some ways we have achieved a degree of maturity in Sustainable Procurement which is quite unique”. Stéphanie Leclerc, our Program Manager for Sustainable Procurement is regularly asked to present our work at nation-wide conferences and so on.
“We still have much ambition for our next strategic planning exercise” adds François Pouliot. We need to ramp up the way we report on our Key Performance Indicators, we are interested in getting more involved with social economy enterprises and are reflecting how to best foster new relationships with indigenous businesses. We also want to increase the level of involvement of our main suppliers, engaging them in managing the social and environmental risks throughout their own supply chain. These, and other objectives will have to be fleshed out and set in a timeline for the next five years.
“We’ll be looking to find two or three students and at least three faculty members to join our Sustainable Procurement Core Team, the group who will be working with us on our next strategic plan.” adds Stéphanie Leclerc. These participants should be available to meet for a few three-hour meetings this year, and then 3 shorter meetings per year over the following years. They should also make themselves available to provide feedback and comments on projects as they are implemented.