茶叶行业职业健康安全管理能力建立

Sustainable Supply Chain Practices

Recent Activities

China Training Institute 2009 Energy Efficiency Training Series
September 18th-19th: Operations Management Focused Training in Guangzhou
Sep 9th Operations Management Focused Webinar: Introduction of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy for Operations Managers
August 5th Executive Focused Training in Guangzhou: Implications of Climate Change on Chinese Business
July 15th Executive Focused Webinar: Introduction of Climate Change Policy for Business Executives

Resources

Contact:Keanu Zhang
Tel: 020-3882 0856

China Climate Change Training Initiative

Background

As the cradle of tea and remains the largest tea producer in the world, China becomes the biggest tea exporter of the world in 2008. In China, there are more than 80,000,000 tea farmers and workers, and over 70,000 tea factories. Tea workers are the stakeholder in the supply chain. Tea processing includes 2 stages: Primary processing and Refinery. China has numerous primary processing factories, but they are small in size. However, refinery factories control the key technology and quality of the exported tea processing. Some large tea companies have built an industrial chain including garden+ primary processing+ refinery+ blending+ trading, but most refinery factories still stands at the tertiary stage of the supply chain and are limited with a small production scale and low price.

The cooperation between BSR and ETP started in 2008 to research the current status of the tea industry supply chain. The research finds the major problem existing in the Chinese tea factories are: insufficient CSR awareness, OT in the busy seasons, salary payment below the local legal requirement, unsafe and unhealthy production environment and the inferior management etc. It comes up to the concern of the whole industry that, as delivering the high quality tea, how to help the industry to create a better and more sustainable business mode, how to build a more stable and ethical supply chain and how to encourage the supplier to guarantee a safer and healthier production environment for workers.

Main challenges encountered in the tea industry:

Lack of the CSR awareness
Lack of the awareness and knowledge of safety production among the management
Insufficient training and vocational health and safety awareness among workers
Work concentrating in the busy season as the feature of seasonal production

Solutions

Beyond Monitoring method: to enhance the industrial CSR awareness through the multi-cooperation and the joint participation by the brands, tea traders, tea producers and processers
Through the capacity building program, to help the factory to improve and to train the management of factory, so as the factory can achieve the capacity of sustainable improvement
Through the multi-cooperation and the training for workers to improve the vocational health and safety awareness
According to the production feature to analyze the OT reason and to set up a reasonable OT schedule

In order to improve the management capacity on vocational health and safety management of Chinese tea producers, to improve the working condition and reduce the health and safety risk during the production, to provide a safer working environment and to meet the outsourcing requirement of ETP members, BSR cooperates with ETP and Hunan Tea Co. Ltd. in 2009 to run the vocational health and safety capacity building program for numbers of Chinese tea suppliers. In June 2009, on-plant research and assessment was carried out in factories, health and safety problems are found in the practice, e.g. insufficient safety management awareness, short of safety protection of machines and equipment, high fire risk and lack of fire fighting facilities and scare training on fire fighting for workers etc. So a 2-days training of vocational health and safety management capacity building was held in July, as the following, ETP and BSR assist the factories to create an improvement plan in order to rectify the problems relating to the vocational health and safety management.

Case study

One tea factory in Hunan has more than 50 staffs, mainly producing and exporting the refined red tea with 1500 tons annual production. Most workers and managers originate from villages and accept less education. The factory is managed only basing on the experience without a sound management system. With many potential safety risks and high fire risk in the workshops, workers are working in an unsafe and unhealthy environment, but they pay less attention to it and are reluctant to communicate with the management.
Through the vocational health and safety capacity building program of ETP, BSR experts undertake an on-plant assessment, promote the importance of vocational health and safety management to the factory managers, analyze the current status and disparity and put forward the solution. The factory management is better aware of the health and safety management knowledge and build up a better management capacity through a 2-days training in which the cross-industrial CSR knowledge and experience are shared. Most risks and hidden dangers of all kinds of machines, fire and vocational health in workshops are eliminated, and the working environment is improved with the assistance of BSR experts through the improvement plan compilation, the sustainable improvement and problem tracing.

Partners

Activities