Nijdra Group now has an EcoVadis 2021 bronze medal in recognition of its sustainability achievements. As part of the assessment, the company is scored for its performance on the topics: environment, labour and human rights, and ethics. With a score of 49, Nijdra is among the top 50% of all companies already assessed by EcoVadis. And naturally, we're very proud of this.
EcoVadis provides sustainability assessments worldwide. It has developed its own platform for assessing companies on sustainability. The companies assessed can share their scorecards with each other. Thanks to EcoVadis, it's now much easier to compare companies on sustainability issues. The database contains about 75,000 companies from all over the world which have been assessed by EcoVadis.
Joeri Prince, Quality Assurance Manager at Nijdra Group, and responsible for the quality assurance and environmental management system, says: “At Nijdra, sustainability and continuous improvement have always been high priorities. A few years ago, a customer asked us to complete a questionnaire about this. We received the medal at that time too. We recently went through the assessment process again. A lot has changed in just a few years. The assessment is much stricter now and you have to provide much more documented information as evidence to achieve good scores.”
We have done the assessment again because sustainability is an increasingly hot topic. Our clients receive these requests from the market. So the request gets channelled into the supply chain, and we have to check our suppliers' sustainability too. This is also reflected under the EcoVadis topic ‘sustainable procurement’.
In the past year we have noticed that more and more clients started to ask for this added value. And we have also noticed that clients are very pleasantly surprised when we tell them we already have this medal. So it's a win-win for us, we’re contributing to sustainability and our client satisfaction level has risen too. This has put Nijdra Group ahead of the game.
Joeri Prince talks about future expectations: “You can't open a newspaper or browse a social media channel without reading about sustainability. We’re responding directly. For example we’re investigating what we need to do in the short-term to attain the EcoVadis silver medal. We’ve established a project team bringing together all disciplines in our organisation to analyse this. And for the longer term, we're also considering certification for a Corporate Social Responsibility management system.”
Joeri Prince, Quality Assurance Manager at Nijdra Group, responsible for the quality and environmental management system.