Cleanaway has released our FY21 Modern Slavery Statement, continuing our journey towards reporting and mitigating modern slavery risks in our supply chains and operations.
Cleanaway Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director Mark Schubert said, “Cleanaway is committed to human rights reporting, transparency and accountability. It’s a core part of our mission to make a sustainable future possible for communities and businesses, particularly with COVID-19 impacting us all. We look forward to continue demonstrating growth and improvement in these areas in the years to come.”
Cleanaway makes protecting our stakeholders a priority, which includes our suppliers, the people engaged by them, and the communities and environment in which they operate. We work to identify, assess and mitigate potential risks throughout our supply chains, which extend internationally to countries with varying levels of modern slavery risks.
Head of Procurement Ezra Clough said, “We made great strides in FY21 with regards to our modern slavery risk management. First, we broadened the use of our Supplier Code of Conduct to more suppliers in our supply chain. This is fundamental to improving Cleanaway’s performance on the modern slavery score and in line with our sustainable sourcing practices, which create long-term value across our supply chain. Second, we made modern slavery training mandatory for all existing white-collar employees and part of the onboarding process for all newcomers to the organisation.”
“Cleanaway understands that we need to educate all entities within our corporate group about the requirements of the Modern Slavery Act, how to better identify modern slavery risks and the processes for reporting any concerns identified, including through Cleanaway’s Whistleblower Policy and our third party service FairCall.” said Ezra.
Following feedback on our FY20 statement, we focused our efforts in communicating our policies and data in a clearer manner, to eliminate any possibility of misinterpretation. We also reached out to our ASX 100 peers whose policies inspired us to implement additional processes into our framework.
In FY21, Cleanaway spent more than $1 billion with more than 6,500 suppliers. Based on The Global Slavery Index, 99.86% of our suppliers operated in countries with low risk of modern slavery. 99.28% of our suppliers operated on-site in Australia, making up the vast majority of our supplier base.
Cleanaway’s FY21 Modern Slavery Statement outlines seven planned actions in FY22:
- audit
- due diligence
- education
- governance and oversight
- policies and standards
- remediation and responses
- training.
These seven areas were identified during the review process of our modern slavery risk management framework in FY21 and will be continuously evaluated against our procedures and industry best practices.
“Making meaningful strides toward eradicating modern slavery requires collaboration with governments and regulators, non‑government organisations, industry bodies as well as our peers and networks across Australia,” Mark explained.
“We acknowledge that there is always work to be done and investments to be made in this area, no matter what organisation or environment you operate in, and Cleanaway takes its obligations to do so very seriously.”
Download Cleanaway’s FY21 Modern Slavery Statement here.
Contact us to learn more about how we’re making a sustainable future possible for communities and businesses across Australia.