The global distributor spoke with CRN about why it has decided it’s time to make a change in the business and ramp up its sustainability initiatives

Westcon-Comstor today announced a fresh drive to become a more environmentally sustainable business with the appointment of Mark McLardie as its head of ESG.

McLardie has been with the distributor for 12 years, most recently in the role of project manager in logistics operations.

Talking to CRN about his new role and Westcon's new sustainability push, McLardie explained how he had been working on a couple of projects linked to sustainability in his previous role, but managing them from a project manager point of view as opposed to actively working on delivering the actions linked to those projects.

"At the beginning of this year, I was given the opportunity to lead the ESG team which was a relatively new initiative, or certainly a new term. We haven't really been talking about ESG in the business before," he said.

The ESG boss explained that at the start of the year, Westcon took a step back and realised it needed to spend some time and energy defining a formal strategy around the subject, having completed an analysis and spotted its gaps.

He added how he felt encouraged by the high level of interest across the leadership team within the business, with all ten members of the executive leadership team (ELT) engaged in the climate strategy definition project, which kicked off in March.

Westcon got the ball rolling on this by studying what its competitors are doing as well as its own vendors and larger partners to help guide its achievement targets.

The distributor also enlisted the aid of climate consultancy EcoAct, who interviewed all ten members of Westcon's ELT to understand what sustainability meant to them within their areas of responsibility.

The outcome of these efforts resulted in Westcon's five-year roadmap towards decarbonisation, alongside recruiting EcoAct consultant Sarah-Jane McGaw as ESG Lead for EMEA.

Continue reading to find out how Westcon-Comstor plans to cut emissions and why it has decided to make these changes now...

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'We realised this was becoming a must have for the business' - Westcon-Comstor kicks off major sustainability push with new head of ESG

The global distributor spoke with CRN about why it has decided it’s time to make a change in the business and ramp up its sustainability initiatives

Westcon's long-term climate goals

At the end of July, Westcon CEO David Grant penned a formal commitment letter aligning the distributor to net zero targets in line with the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) within the next 24 months.

This means the group is committed to reducing its emissions by 90 per cent to reach net zero by 2050 at the latest.

"From my point of view, there's no going back. You can draw a line in the sand and say this is our intention and there's no way to backtrack," McLardie said.

Westcon has also established a baseline and committed to reducing its scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.

The target is to halve scope 1 and 2 emissions by the year 2030 and cut scope 3 emissions by 25 per cent by 2030 from a FY2022 base year.

Approximately 70 per cent of Westcon's scope 1 and 2 emissions are linked to the procurement of energy, and there is a big opportunity to significantly reduce these in a relatively short space of time by moving across to renewable energy tariffs, McLardie said.

Looking more specifically to scope 1 emissions, most come from mobile combustion, however Westcon is tackling this through its electric vehicle salary sacrifice scheme which was launched earlier this year in the UK.

"We realised quite early on in terms of the work that we were doing in sustainability that the vast majority of our emissions start within the supply chain," McLardie explained.

"We estimate that 99 per cent of those emissions sit within the supply chain. So it's very important to go back to the fact that we've made that commitment to reduce emissions, not just within our own business.

"And that's really where that supplier target comes in, to making sure that we are pushing our key vendors because the vast majority of our supplier spend sits with nine or ten of our top vendors.

"So the reality is we need to be making sure that those vendors are on a similar path to us in terms of sharing our aspirations and making similar commitments towards decarbonisation, because what they're doing in this area and the actions that they're taking are going to be absolutely critical to ensure that we can meet the objectives that we've set and the commitments we've made."

McLardie added Westcon will introduce an addendum by 1 March next year for vendors, partners and suppliers to abide by its environmental provisions as a way to combat scope 3 emissions on top of a 25 per cent reduction by 2030.

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Why is Westcon focusing on sustainability now?

McLardie revealed that over the past 12 - 18 months Westcon had been receiving more and more questions from partners around what the distributor is doing for the environment and more specifically around climate change.

"We realised that this was fast becoming a ‘must have' for us as a business as opposed to a ‘nice to have'", he said.

"We see very clearly now that when our larger partners are evaluating us as one of their suppliers, some of them are actually fairly transparent in the way that they conduct evaluation and there'll be lots of criteria in there.

"But sustainability is slowly but surely making its way up the list in terms of priority.

"We recognised that if we didn't start working and investing in this area significantly now, it would have been very easy for us to fall behind the curve and behind our competitors in a relatively short space of time.

"And I think that investment is only going to continue as we move forward because we're under no illusions that having made that commitment to net zero and decarbonisation it's going to require transformative change throughout our entire business. It's not something that we can just manage in isolation."

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