Analysing tyre makers' role in the sustainability of the natural rubber supply chain

Abstract

As the global demand for natural rubber grows, there has been a rapid expansion of rubber plantations and rubber processing factories. This unsustainable expansion leads to increasing concerns about the environmental impacts and social implications on the supply chain stakeholders. This paper aims to understand how one of the major consumers of natural rubber, tyre companies, have integrated sustainability initiatives in their supply chain to limit these negative impacts. This is done by examining six types of sustainability initiatives: Codes of Conduct, Supplier Quality Management, Sustainable Natural Rubber Policies, Social responsibility initiatives, Environmental responsibility initiatives, and Company Overviews. Each initiative was analysed along five different dimensions: their structure, their defining parties, the stakeholders they engaged, their verifying parties and the sustainability themes addressed. The results of this analysis reveal that tyre companies had implementation-oriented initiatives that were defined only by the tyre company. These initiatives were largely firm-oriented and internally verified for their compliance. The majority of these initiatives focused on human and labour rights issues and had some engagement with NGOs. Overall, this study showed that the tyre industry inadequately addressed sustainability throughout its supply chain. As such, moving forward, stakeholders such as NGOs and downstream consumers of tyres need to play a bigger role in putting pressure on tyre companies to make more comprehensive commitments towards sustainable natural rubber.