The road to EcoVadis Platinum with the support of DFGE
Customer: Ardagh Group S.A.
Category: Packaging
Date: January 2023
Ardagh Group is a leading global supplier of sustainable, infinitely recyclable metal and glass packaging for brand owners around the world. Ardagh employs approximately 20,000 people at 65 production facilities in 16 countries. However, Ardagh is not only a market leader in its industry, but it is also at the forefront of sustainability – these efforts have now been rewarded with an outstanding EcoVadis Platinum sustainability rating.
Ardagh has participated in the EcoVadis Assessment for several years, documenting its sustainability performance in the areas of environment, labour and human rights, sustainable procurement, and ethics. In 2022, Ardagh set itself a goal to further improve on its previous Gold-Rating to become one of the top 1% of companies recognised with a platinum EcoVadis rating. For this reason, Ardagh collaborated with the experts at DFGE, whose many years of expertise could help them to better identify, record, and further intensify their global sustainability activities.
Gunther Wagner
Sustainability Manager, Ardagh Group
”DFGE was the right partner for our goal to achieve a Platinum EcoVadis rating that reflects our sustainability performance. With the help of DFGE’s experts, we were able to again improve our good rating and close gaps in the presentation of our sustainability performance. The result reflects the successful cooperation.”
Challenges
Identification of opportunities for improvement in EcoVadis
In a first project step, the DFGE team reviewed Ardagh’s previous EcoVadis Scorecards and analysed other support materials. The focus here was primarily on identifying existing gaps in the documentation of Ardgah’s sustainability performance.
Also, the team identified which documents were not suitable or no longer up to date for the assessment and streamlined the questionnaire to the most important and meaningful documents. These results were recorded in detail in a gap analysis template and served as a basis for further project steps.
Solutions
Workshop and Action Plan
A gap workshop followed, where new findings were presented to Ardagh’s internal CSR team, discussed, and further investigated. A document collection phase based on the results of the gap analysis was actioned by DFGE.
The main challenge was to map the group’s structure in EcoVadis and to collect documents reflecting the CSR performance of the 65 production sites around the world. The DFGE experts supported the CSR team in compiling appropriate evidence of their group sustainability performance and monitored the progress.
Result
Successful EcoVadis participation and rating improvement
Ardagh achieved its goal of a Platinum rating, placing it in the top 1% of companies assessed by EcoVadis. This result clearly sets the company apart from the industry average, especially in vital areas such as environment, as well as labor and human rights.
Achieving the rating was not the end of the project. The DFGE EcoVadis experts analysed the new EcoVadis rating and presented Ardagh’s CSR team with advice on how to maintain their platinum rating in years to come, and indeed how to improve upon it.
