In August 2011, the Adidas Group began a program to help its suppliers achieve their 2015 targets for energy reduction, and now all the companies that participated in the program have energy teams of their own.
The Adidas Group worked with the German Organization for International Cooperation (GIZ) on “Greening Global Supply Chains – Focus on Energy in Indonesia,” to build internal capacities within factories so they would be able to monitor their energy usage and come up with energy saving measures, according to a blog on the Adidas Group website.
The partners targeted 16 of Adidas’ main suppliers, clustered in four geographic groups: Bogor/Sukabumi area; Tangerang Footwear area; Tangerang Apparel area and Subang/Bandung area.
Over the course of four months, the partners conducted three workshop sessions, followed by a series of technical assistance meetings for all factories involved in the project. After their training sessions, suppliers were given time to implement energy programs, and then Adidas and GIZ monitored their progress.
The topics covered during the training sessions were:
- energy management;
- energy audits;
- financial assessment and monitoring.
According to the Adidas blog, all the suppliers involved in the training now have their own energy teams, and some of them are working to attain the ISO 50001 certification in 2014.
Recent research by renewable energy company Urban Wind suggests that policies targeting vendors’ energy use are putting a lot of pressure on suppliers.