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SELINA DONALD FOUNDER AND CHIEF SUSTAINABILITY ADVISOR , THE BULB

Still , it doesn ’ t come down solely to checking your partners . A deep understanding of markets is also informative and essential . Only then will sustainable procurement become shockproof . Going back to Simon Gaele at Proxima , he says : “ Understanding the supply market means you will get the best outcomes available to you . If you don ’ t understand the market , you will always buy what you know , or , at best , be constrained by your own ideas and open to supply market risk . That ’ s a dangerous place to be in .”

Gaele does concede that the market – the lifeblood of enterprise and capitalism – does have a seminal part in the quest for sustainable procurement : “ As unfashionable as it is to say sometimes , markets inform what we should be paying for sustainable solutions ; even in a deep collaboration where we are ‘ designing to X ,’ market intelligence informs commercial value calculations , top and bottom line .”

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