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2021 Responsible Purchasing Update
At Thornton Tomasetti, responsible purchasing includes buying local and healthy foods and purchasing eco-friendly office supplies and energy-efficient equipment.
Because our role in projects is often limited to design and consulting, our direct procurement activities are typically limited to the purchase of office supplies. In cases where we do hire subconsultants or specify materials for projects, we follow our Ethical Sourcing Policy, which helps ensure that the products we procure are sourced in a responsible and sustainable manner and that individuals involved in their manufacture are working in a safe and fair environment. Our contracting process promotes social equity by encouraging the hiring of small businesses owned by socially and economically disadvantaged people or employing firms that have demonstrated a clear mission of promoting social equity.
In line with our environmental statement – to apply creative means of reducing carbon in our projects – we are guided by our embodied-carbon specifications for concrete and steel, developed in 2021, when sourcing building materials so that our structural engineering projects use materials or adjustments to materials that are less carbon intensive than standard options. We also aim to avoid the use of toxic materials on the Living Building Challenge Red List.
Following our sustainable office guidelines, we give preference to office supplies with high recycled content and low toxicity. In the United States, we purchase 60 percent of our office supplies through Staples, which defines eco-products as either “basic” or “advanced.” Basic have more common eco-features among products in the industry, such as containing less than 30 percent post-consumer content. Advanced have leading environmental features, such as a certification under a leading standard established by third-party programs like Energy Star, fair trade and Cradle to Cradle.
In 2021, 26 percent of the office supplies we purchased from Staples met the criteria for “eco-products.” This is lower than our pre-pandemic average of nearly 50 percent. Why this reduction? We bought fewer office supplies in 2021, and many were from vendors other than Staples. Items purchased from Staples were primarily foodware, break-room supplies, paper and ink. At 59 percent of expenditures on paper products, our eco-spend on paper was higher than those for all other products. Paper-use reduction is addressed in our sustainable operations guidelines, which recommend using 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper, distributing documents electronically whenever possible, and printing on two sides when hard copies are needed.
This declining level of office-supply purchasing is a positive trend, since we reduce our carbon footprint when we consume less. That’s why our sustainable operations guidelines encourage our offices to seek additional ways to reduce supplies and limit resource use. For example, consolidating orders lowers delivery-related transportation emissions and reduces packaging materials used by suppliers. With employees returning to offices and resuming their former workplace behaviors, our challenge will be to continue this trend.