Suppliers

Each step in our supply chain is an opportunity to align with our Promise to improve lives by helping solve the world’s greatest challenges.

This includes employment, embracing diversity, and community building, as well as mitigating risks, whether they are related to labor, environmental, health and safety, ethical practices, or management systems.

Our commitment, from leadership down, is to align with industry recognized frameworks, and work with our suppliers to achieve synergy across our supply chain with our own corporate values. We expect our suppliers to be transparent about their environmental and social practices, provide ideas for improvement, and work with us to transform our shared value chain.

At 3M, we expect our suppliers to strive for and achieve the same bar we set for ourselves regarding environmental and social governance. 3M follows the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Due Diligence framework for all of our responsible sourcing activities. The 3M Supplier Responsibility Code (SRC) is based on our corporate values for sustainable and responsible operations and aligns with the Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact, of which 3M is a participant.

We focused on:
 

• Setting goals
• Enhancing data collection, analytics and reporting through automation
• Increasing visibility and identification of diverse suppliers
• Expanding diversity education and training, internally and externally
• Forging relationships with local advocacy groups to advance our supplier diversity infrastructure

In addition to increasing our total supplier diversity headcount in 2021, 3M spending with small businesses represented 7.56% and diverse suppliers reflected 5.48% of our total U.S. spend. Our progress is routinely communicated to leadership across the organization.

In 2021, we assessed about 11% of our higher-risk suppliers, completing over 478 assessments in 30 countries, which covered every geographic area of the world. Since 2008, we’ve conducted almost 7,900 on-site or self-assessments of prioritized suppliers in higher-risk countries.

3M is an active member of the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI), which develops tools and provides guidance for companies regarding conflict minerals. In October 2021, 3M attended the annual RMI Members-Only conference to discuss strategies and best practices regarding the expansion of a market-driven, responsible sourcing supply chain.

3M worked with a third party to manage our 2021 program outreach and data collection, which automated the processes that support 3M’s Responsible Minerals Sourcing program.

We have been shifting our overall focus to more direct collaborations with suppliers and other third parties.

To date, 3M has participated in transformation projects covering over 10 million hectares of forest.

We have done this through:
 

• Satellite monitoring of forests in British Columbia, Canada, including where Earthworm Foundation (EF) is working with the Tsay Keh Dene to identify HCV (high conservation value) areas
• Support for human rights in forestry through backing EF’s assessment of the Chilean forestry stakeholder perceptions of the pulp and paper sector’s performance on human rights
• Proudly supporting the Sustainable Forestry and African American Land Retention (SFLR) Network in their efforts for environmental justice