Supply chain

Safeguarding human rights, humane working conditions and the war against corruption may be a matter of course for us, but does the same hold true for our suppliers? Our sense of responsibility is not limited to the confines of our plant premises. By implementing a supply chain management system, we want to ensure that our business relationships with external partners adhere to our groupwide code of conduct. According to the code, we are forbidden from maintaining business relationships with suppliers who are publicly known to infringe the fundamental ethical principles set forth by the UN “Global Compact” initiative. We focus especially on the purchase of fuel–above all hard coal–by RWE Supply & Trading. This RWE subsidiary has systematically subjected our suppliers to intensive scrutiny since 2007. The risk that fundamental environmental and social standards might be neglected is usually much lower in the procurement of plants and complex components, because suppliers in this sector almost exclusively come from OECD member states.