Resumo

Procurement is a key sector and policy area in which entities and countries can, and increasingly do, seek to promote environmental and social sustainability. Sustainable procurement requires an understanding of the full impact of purchase throughout the entire life cycle of the product or service, irrespective of location. The widespread presence of the chemicals in everyday activities provides benefits to societies’ wellbeing, but at the same time might have some harmful results especially related to the environmental and social impacts.

The aim is to investigate the adoption of sustainable procurement in some Brazilian chemical companies. Interviews with professionals from the Brazilian Chemical Industry Association (ABIQUIM) and from thirty-seven associated companies were used to elaborate empirical illustrations about sustainable procurement practices in the Brazilian chemical industry context.

Sustainable procurement requires consideration of economic, environmental and social consequences when making buyer selection decisions (Kalubanga, 2012). From the literature review it was elaborated some constructs for investigating the dimensions of sustainable procurement. They are organizational orientation and supplier selection. The supplier’s selection criteria is both quantitative and qualitative. The former classification refers to costs and monetary terms, while the qualitative classification is subjective and depends on the company’s view of sustainability (Kalubanga, 2012).

The interviews were conducted using a questionnaire comprised of 28 questions. E-mail is used to collect the answers to the questionnaire using the forms available at GoogleDocs. The first version of the questionnaire was submitted for validation to eighteen procurement professionals (procurement managers and analysts) from three large chemical companies located in Brazil. The researchers sent invitations to 131 analysts and procurement managers from 38 chemical industries. A total of 93 professionals accepted the invitation, and 37 answered the submitted questionnaire.

Although the companies did not have a prescriptive supplier selection model that incorporates social-environmental criteria, most companies had more restrictive standards than the legislation and they supported suppliers to improve their social-environmental performance. In addition, that actions related to social and environmental issues occur in policies and documents and are reflected through middle and upper management commitments. It indicates that there are some organizational directions to incorporate social and environmental questions.

This work addresses some gaps in the current literature. The first refers to the consideration of both environmental and social criteria following the concept of the TBL. Second, it addresses the importance of identifying and evaluating the criteria considered in supplier selection in line with Govindan et al. (2015). The results offer new insights for exploring these issues for the same procurement firms in different institutional environments, for verifying the weight of labour laws and for ascertaining whether the weight of this criterion is really more important in some countries.

Kalubanga, M. (2012). Sustainable procurement: Concept, and Practical Implications for the Procurement Process. International Journal of Economics and Management Sciences, 1(7), 1–7. Govindan, K., Rajendran, S., Sarkis, J., & Murugesan, P. (2015). Multi criteria decision making approaches for green supplier evaluation and selection: a literature review. Journal of Cleaner Production, 98, 66–83.