Inbrief

German-based home care products company Henkel is preparing for its first series of social audits of suppliers. Michael Bahn, director of corporate sustainability management, said the audits would take ‘three or four years to cover 80 to 90 per cent of our suppliers’. The first step will be to ‘tell our suppliers what we expect of them’. The multinational, which makes consumer goods such as cosmetics, shampoo and adhesives and has 48,000 employees worldwide, will consider this year how it can make social responsibility part of the quality standards it expects of suppliers.