CAPRAL Aluminium: Developing a quality organisation

28 November 2023

Implementing an integrated management approach

Our ASI membership is important to us because it’s supporting our development as a quality organisation. With so many complexities within our business, ASI’s emphasis on total quality management helped to bring our various operations together through an integrated management approach.

As part of the certification process, we were able to apply LCA methodologies and put metrics on our actions, e.g. product sourcing, and analyse their consequential outcomes and social impact. We also use LCA methodology for waste management. It caused us to think about expanding our system requirements to drive better efficiencies with transport, waste creation processes and end of life of waste. We have even gone as far as creating a level of circularity with our customers to reuse their packaging and train them to have better environmental management practices associated with what Capral does.

ASI has helped us to look at our entire business through a quality management framework and apply a sustainable ESG metric to all aspects. This is a remarkable achievement which will hold us in stead in terms of future ESG reporting requirements.

Image credit: CAPRAL Limited

ASI certified CAPRAL ALUMINIUM against Performance Standard V3 (2022) and Chain of Custody Standard V2 (2022) in June 2023

Strengthening Supplier and Customer Engagement

Implementing ASI Standards led to the expansion of our existing IMS (Integrated Management System) and the capture of sustainability data (waste, electricity, etc) using our proprietary software. We broke down our operations into ESG practices and applied a risk management approach to our supply chain. This helped us engage more meaningfully with our customers to properly understand their requirements. Initially it was challenging to get buy in from our stakeholders, but through implementing a risk management methodology, we were able to drill down into supplier regions to understand the impact of our sourcing practices on human rights. We developed an ethical framework to bolster our sourcing requirements and conducted risk assessments on every supplier to Capral.

Using ASI as a framework, we also developed a system for integrated waste management that has resulted in cost savings as we are now more effective at optimising usage, tracking and minimising waste going to landfill.

Image credit: CAPRAL Limited

Confidence in our assurance processes

Identifying and plugging the gaps in our assurance process was a bonus for us. We can now provide documentation and a risk assessment methodology to prove that our suppliers have been assessed against our requirements. We conduct site visits where necessary and have formalised our processes. Part of this included making some difficult sourcing decisions in order to maintain our corporate citizenship credentials.

Image credit: CAPRAL Limited

Achieving a sustainable future based on data

Data collection and data sourcing are further improvements we would like to make moving forward.

We understand that data science is complex without the added complexities of human factors, emissions factors, waste reduction, etc. We are therefore going to improve our collection and interpretation of data to ensure we are achieving a sustainable future. We will need to develop data capturing frameworks for key metrics that demonstrate the pathway forward.

We will also improve our stakeholder engagement processes as we have seen increased customer interest associated with our ASI membership. There are many customers that don’t understand the benefits of ASI and we had to educate them and explain the value of ASI and the benefit of buying from a certified entity. We have also explained what ASI Certification means in practice – that Sustainability or Decarbonisation ambitions are not just about emissions. It is also a holistic ESG journey that addresses a company’s performance against social, equality, diversity, training, and community engagement.

Image credit: CAPRAL Limited

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