During the second session of the first day, Gundula Ullah, Chief Procurement & Sustainability Officer of the Funke Mediengruppe, Germany, and Shyam Shanker, Director – Business & Commercial at Bennett, Coleman and Co. Ltd. (Times Group), India, discussed “Sustainable Procurement for Newspaper Production”, with Thomas Isaksen, Managing Director of Den Danske Presses Faellesindkøbs-Forening, acting as moderator.
“It’s a difficult time for production of newspapers, a difficult time for transportation
and it’s a very difficult time to get the right sourcing into our business,
so procurement is a key issue.”
(T. Isaksen)
In fact, the issue of procurement is one of the biggest issues facing newspapers. First, the Covid pandemic caused enormous challenges to the supply chains, directly followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In this session, two procurement executives told their stories:

First Gundula Ullah presented the “Sustainable Procurement for Newspaper Production” of Funke Mediengruppe (“a house of stories”, in her own words). For Funke, sustainability needs to be one thing: “Credible”.

Funke’s sustainability move and strategy includes:

A selection of 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals
The upcoming EU Supply Chain Act
Compliance of the German “Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz” (a description of this law in English can be found here)
Reduction of carbon-dioxide (CO2) output and energy consumption

…