PROCUREMENT

From large mechanical parts for our ships to ingredients to feed thousands of people at a time, down to the smallest details, like toiletries, and medical items, we need to buy a huge amount of supplies for our fleet, crew and guests.

Managing environmental, social and ethical issues in our supply chain is critical, and we take a robust approach to this across all areas of procurement.

Reducing Environmental Impact

We are working in partnership with our suppliers to raise environmental standards. All employees involved in any purchasing, sourcing and contracting activity must commit themselves to raising awareness among our suppliers on how to reduce any environmental impacts linked to their production chain, operation and final products.

This includes reducing energy consumption, cutting plastic use, preventing air, ground and water pollution, the safe handling, storage and disposal of chemicals and hazardous waste, and ensuring that workers and employees handling hazardous waste are adequately trained.

Reducing Environmental Impact

Reducing plastics

We continue to work with our supply chain to seek plastic-free alternatives for products and packaging. We are not using single-use plastics in our buffet restaurants and no straws on our ships are made of traditional plastic. Our goal is to eliminate single-use plastics across all our operations.

MSC Cruises signed the UK Chamber of Shipping’s Single Use Plastic Charter. This commits the business, along with 28 other signatories, to eliminate single-use plastics.

It’s one small part of our efforts to reduce waste on board, along with our efficient recycling systems available on all our ships that help sort, recycle and reuse as much waste as possible across our fleet.

Reducing plastics

Sustainable Procurement Committee

We created a new committee dedicated to making sure that our approach to procurement has a positive impact on society and minimizes damage to the environment. Part of the committee’s remit is to standardize our approach so we can use similar KPIs across our business. For instance, we are introducing best practice approaches that mean that the teams that procure food and beverages will operate in a similar way to our technical procurement teams.

We continue to look for ways to simplify the extensive logistics required to ensure the timely delivery of products to our ships.