New release: a benchmark of 3 European regulations on corporate sustainability against both the OBP and Social+ OBP Standards.
Consumer awareness and concerns to understand what is “behind” the products they buy, and whether there are possible unethical practices in their supply chains are growing. In response, governments, especially in Europe, are adopting due diligence directives or laws for companies. These establish legally binding obligations to identify and prevent adverse impacts resulting from their activities and operations throughout their supply chains. In other words, corporate accountability in a globalised economy.
These new regulations ensure that investors and other stakeholders have access to the information they need to assess to measure the impact of companies on people and the environment, and subsequentially, assess financial risks and opportunities arising from climate change and other sustainability issues. These regulations also ensure the identification, monitoring and remediation of possible human rights and environmental risks by companies.
The absence of developing a plan to address these requirements, or faults in the plan´s implementation, empower potentially affected people to hold companies accountable and exposes the company involved to penalties, fines or other punishments.
Within the strategies implemented by companies to ensure compliance with such regulations, a very common practice is to have their supply chains comply with internal or external standards. Due to the variety of regulations and supply chains, companies may need to analyse and rely on multiple standards to match the requirements. To facilitate this work in the area of using certified recycled Ocean Bound Plastic as raw materials, ZPO has revised 3 different European regulations:
- The EU Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence 2024
- The French Corporate Duty of Vigilance Law 2018
- And the German Act on Corporate Due Diligence Obligations in Supply Chains, 2023,
to benchmark the specified risks established in each of these 3 regulations, and how they can be addressed if using OBP and Social + OBP[1] material in their supply chains.
Each of the three regulations analysed have their particularities regarding: (i) whether an Organization falls within the scope of requiring to comply with the specific regulation or not (depending on nature/geography/size/operations), (ii) how they should establish and implement their plan and procedures, and the extent to which they should address prevention, correction and monitoring of determined risks, and, (iii) the type of penalties, procedures, and periods for correction in cases of non-compliance with some aspects of the regulation. These aspects fall outside the scope of our benchmark and need to be revised in detail by interested organizations. We do attempt however to address in detail the identified environmental and social risks established in each of them, and how our standards can help minimise risks.
[1] Social + OBP is particularly efficient addressing ethical and social risks for recycled plastic because it is the only program that includes informal waste pickers within its certification scope, which is the first step in the recycled plastic supply chain.
HIGH LEVEL OVERVIEW OF COVERAGE
The below graphics provide an overview of how many requirements present in the directive or laws are also addressed in the OBP or Social+ OBP Certification. For each you will find a more detailed benchmark in the annexes of the document available for download at the end of this post.
Note: Most of the environmental factors addressed in the laws or directive are not relevant to plastic collection or recycling, so the coverage of OBP certification is naturally low.
Please find here the full benchmark