SA8000
Type: Certificate valid for 3 years with inspections every 6 months
Inspection criteria:
- No child labor
- No forced labor
- Occupational health and safety
- Freedom of assembly and collective bargaining
- Non-discrimination
- No punishment
- Working hours in accordance with national standards
Minimum wage
Additional information:
- Same requirements as BSCI and ISO9001
- Particularly suitable for internationally operating companies
- Documents compliance with social and labor standards
- Socially fair working conditions, health protection, and environmentally friendly production conditions
- Developed in 1997/98 by the non-governmental organization Social Accountability International (SAI) in the USA
- Based on international human rights conventions, recommendations by the International Labour Organization (ILO), and various ISO standards from the quality management system standard ISO 9001
- Current figures:
- 56 industries from 58 countries are certified
- Over 2,000,000 employees from 4,608 locations
Leather Working Group
Type: Registered membership and audited membership
Inspection criteria:
- Making leather processing transparent, i.e. traceability of leather sourcing
- Issuing seals in quality levels Gold, Silver, Bronze, with evaluation of the supply chain transparency from A to C → rated “A” if the leather can be traced back to the slaughterhouse
Additional information:
- Multi-stakeholder initiative, NPO
- Founded in 2005 in England
- No sanctions or exclusions from the group if required progress is not made
- Focus on environmental aspects of leather processing such as chemical and water consumption
- Figures: Over 600 leather manufacturers certified, around 23% of finished leather comes from LWG certified manufacturers, globally 945 members
ISO9001 (DIN (national) EN (European level) ISO (worldwide))
Type: Certificate for 3 years, then recertification required
Inspection criteria:
- Increase transparency of your business processes
- Sustainably improve customer satisfaction
- Significantly reduce error rates and thus costs
- Exceed customer expectations
Additional information:
- Quality management standard, the most widely used quality management standard nationally and internationally
- Defines minimum requirements for a company’s quality management system
- Helps improve corporate performance at all levels
- Better quality management helps save money, increase profits, and generate new business
- Customer orientation as one of the most important principles of quality management (identifying current and future customer needs and expectations → Can they be fulfilled?)
Goal: Exceed customer expectations
ISO 14001 (DIN EN ISO)
Type: Certificate for 3 years, then recertification required
Inspection criteria:
- Increased resource efficiency
- Reduction of consumption and environmental costs
- Conditions of internal environmental policy
- Assessment, determination, and monitoring of significant environmental aspects
- Appointment of an environmental management officer
- Training and informing employees
- Documentation of the environmental management system
- Internal audits
Additional information:
- Globally applied standard for environmental management systems
- Published in 1996 by the International Organization for Standardization and updated in 2015
- Defines requirements for an environmental management system (improve environmental performance, meet legal and social obligations, and achieve environmental goals)
- Applicable to organizations of all types and sizes
- DOES NOT set absolute requirements for environmental performance → Requirements for ISO 14001 can be met with different environmental performances (between two companies)
- Approximately 300,000 companies and organizations worldwide are certified
- All EMAS certified companies can also be certified according to ISO 14001, but not vice versa
Sedex
Type: Membership available upon application
Inspection criteria:
- Fair working conditions
- Health and safety
- Business ethics
- Environmental management
Additional information:
- Supplier Ethical Data Exchange (Sedex), the largest collaborative platform for sharing sustainable, ethical supply chain data
- Globally recognized innovative and effective solution for supply chain management
- Founded in 2002
- Helps reduce risks, protect the company's reputation, and improve supply chain procedures
- Over 60,000 members in 180 countries across 35 industry sectors
BSCI (Business Social Compliance Initiative)
Type: 2 types of membership according to the Code of Conduct:
- Regular: with participation in the supply chain, thus part of the audit and quality process
- Associate membership: no active role in the supply chain
Inspection criteria:
- Compliance wi
