Action wants to offer products that go beyond compliance with safety and quality standards. We want products that are sourced responsibly and offer good value for money. To live up to our environmental and social ambitions, we have developed a roadmap and a set of sustainability policies.
With a broad assortment, complex supply chains and multiple sourcing models it is necessary for us to have great insights into our manufacturing base. This gives us a better understanding of important social conditions such as labour conditions and health and safety.
As a retailer, it comes as no surprise that our products are the largest impact contributors. We have made significant progress in generating the necessary insights on the circularity of our products.We have developed specific circularity plans for half of our product categories to identify opportunities to reduce their footprint and increase their circularity. In 2022, we will develop plans for the remaining product categories.
In the past years, we have prioritised timber and cotton, in our efforts to create positive impact for the raw materials we use. Ahead of our goals, in 2021 70% of our timber-based products and 86% of our cotton products were sourced more sustainably. We therefore decided to bring our goal of achieving 100% sustainable sourcing for these materials forward to 2024. We are increasingly looking at other raw materials sourced for our products that can make a large positive social or environmental impact.
We are increasingly able to offer our customers more certified sustainable products. Customers can find more and more products with sustainability labels on our shelves: FSC and PEFC for timber products, Fairtrade for chocolate, Rainforest Alliance for coffee and OEKO-TEX for textiles.
Read more about our policies for Responsible SourcingTransparency on our supply chain allows us to monitor social compliance and identify risk hotspots across the wholesalers and manufacturers producing for Action. This in turn enables us to strengthen our suppliers and create positive social change. Our target for social compliance is to have 100% transparency by 2025 for all private and white label products. This helps us understand the risks on social compliance at the factory level and comply with the applicable due diligence legislation.
Every year independent third parties audit the factories that work for Action. This ensures our factories comply with our Ethical Sourcing Policy.
The production and disposal of packaging material presents an enormous challenge to the environment. Our packaging policy applies to both our product and transit packaging. The aim of the policy is to reduce the negative social and environmental impacts of packaging within our supply chain. By reducing the amount of packaging waste and establishing circularity in all packaging.
As our products come from all over the world, making and using different packaging heavily impacts these manufacturing processes. Along with our packaging policy, we developed a Supplier Packaging Best Practice Guide. The environmentally friendly packaging has become an integral part of our negotiations when buying products.
To make our packaging more recyclable for our private label products, we will phase out black plastic by end of 2022.This involves avoiding virgin plastic and using only transparent and coloured PET to make sure that all our plastic packaging is recyclable.