Supply Chain Environmental Management

Ford has worked with our suppliers for decades to improve the environmental sustainability of their products and processes – and to gain their support in improving our own sustainability performance. We were the first automaker to require our suppliers to certify their environmental management systems to the globally recognized standard ISO 14001.

Today, we remain committed to providing suppliers with a range of support and assistance based on our expertise and experiences. We regularly engage with our suppliers on sustainability issues, and we have developed initiatives to improve our understanding of environmental impacts and practices in several areas, including greenhouse gas emissions, materials management and logistics.

For example, we are working to better understand the carbon footprint of our supply chain by surveying our suppliers on their greenhouse gas emissions. We have expanded the number of suppliers we include in this survey each year; we surveyed 145 suppliers in 2013 and plan to expand this to significantly more suppliers in 2014.

In 2014, we are also beginning to assess our suppliers’ water footprint. We are surveying a subset of our Tier 1 suppliers through the CDP Water program. We are prioritizing which suppliers we include in both our CDP greenhouse gas and water surveys based on a variety of criteria including suppliers with higher GHG or water intensity, strategic suppliers and supplier location. We ultimately plan to include all of our ABF suppliers as well as other Tier 1 suppliers who represent a significant portion of our annual purchases and suppliers who have been identified as having high water use and/or operate in highly water stressed regions. For more information about our corporate water strategy, please see the Water section.