Building strong relationships with our supply chain partners, where both parties promote socially and environmentally responsible business practices, is not just good for safeguarding business continuity but also for a healthier planet and healthier people.
Our impact as a business expands along our whole value chain, from the ingredients and materials we source through to our consumers. We source from 40 countries and over 400 direct suppliers so it's important that we have confidence in the ethical and environmental practices of every single supplier and partner.
We are committed to building supply chain capability and driving continuous improvement on ethical and environmental issues. We work to ensure sustainable sourcing throughout the supply chain. We do this by:
We are embedding sustainability into all of our sourcing processes to ensure we work with suppliers who prioritise sustainability in their business. This means when we review prospective suppliers they are requested to provide information on their sustainability management and performance to assist in our pre-assessment process. We utilise the Sedex data exchange platform to engage with our direct suppliers. This tool allows us to assess the ethical risks in our supply chain, Any of our suppliers who are identified as high risk may be subject to a third-party audit. Supplier risk assessment is a key process in ensuring we have full visibility of the activities and the people working in our supply chains, and in order to ensure we are committed to healthier people and a healthier planet.
We collaborate with our suppliers to enhance sustainability performance. For example, our partnerships with our co-packers have helped address shared challenges including investigating closed loop glass recycling. We also work with wider industry groups such as the AIM Progress Group to contribute to the development of the responsible sourcing agenda.
In 2020, we developed and launched our supply chain engagement programme, including a discovery questionnaire which was shared with a number of our most material suppliers and covered the key sustainable business aspects. The outcome was a clear picture of our combined environmental impacts which is now being used to support our planning for a low carbon economy journey. We intend to roll out the engagement programme to the majority of our suppliers over the next two years.
We have recently partnered with EcoVadis, a supplier assessment tool to help us measure and encourage our suppliers to improve in their sustainability performance.
Regenerative agriculture refers to farming practices which deliver climate change reduction benefits such as restoring soil biodiversity. In line with our commitments on reducing our carbon footprint and improving the recyclability of our packaging, we are in the process of updating our sustainable sourcing strategy for key agricultural ingredients such as fruits to ensure we source from suppliers and farmers who are meeting regenerative agricultural principles.
We have recently become a member of the Sustainable Agricultural Initiative Platform to identify solutions to help meet regenerative agricultural principles in our ingredient supply chains. We are aiming for 100% of our key agricultural ingredients to be sustainably sourced by 2025.
We engage with suppliers to address challenges and drive positive change through our Procurement and Supplier Quality Assurance teams and processes, as well as through conferences and training sessions for suppliers. We are committed to sourcing the materials we need and the ingredients of our drinks in a responsible manner and continually strive for the highest ethical standards, holding our suppliers and partners to the same criteria.
Our approach is guided by international conventions and standards, including the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Our policy extends to our suppliers and other trading partners and compliance is monitored through our responsible sourcing programme. Since fully integrating all Britvic business units into our responsible sourcing programme in 2018, we are proud to confirm the percentage of direct suppliers linked to us on Sedex, the ethical supply chain data platform we use, is 79% across the Group over the course of 2021.
Society is consuming more resources than ever before and with a rising global population the world's natural resources are being put under increasing pressure. As a business, waste represents an avoidable cost and we are committed to making our business more efficient by reducing, reusing, recycling and recovering our waste, ensuring that the waste residues that remain are disposed of using the most environmentally responsible options.
Our approach to waste management starts with the investment we have made in state of the art technology at our manufacturing sites to drive efficiency and minimise our waste generation. We work closely with our waste management contractors to ensure optimum end of life for our waste and responsible disposal. 2021 was the first year we achieved zero waste to landfill globally.
