If a major customer asks your packaging company for an EcoVadis scorecard, sending a list of recyclable products will not answer the question.
EcoVadis is assessing how your company manages sustainability. It looks for policies, actions and measured results across environment, labour and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement. Your product specifications may support that story, but they are not the whole story.
The reverse is also true. A strong EcoVadis medal does not prove that every carton, pouch or cup you sell has a lower environmental impact. Company performance and product performance are related. They are not interchangeable.
Packaging businesses that understand that distinction tend to build better submissions — and give customers better answers after the assessment is over.
What EcoVadis assesses
EcoVadis rates the quality of a company's sustainability management system. Its methodology is organised around three management pillars:
- Policies: what the company has formally committed to do
- Actions: how those commitments are implemented
- Results: what the company measures and achieves
Those pillars are assessed across four themes:
- Environment
- Labour and human rights
- Ethics
- Sustainable procurement
The questionnaire is tailored to the assessed entity's activity, size and location. A flexible-plastics manufacturer, a paper packaging converter and a distributor importing finished foodservice packaging should not expect identical questions.
That tailoring matters. EcoVadis is not asking every company to collect every possible sustainability document. It is asking whether the business has identified and managed the issues that are material to its own operations and value chain.
How the assessment works
The process has four broad stages:
- Register the company and establish the assessment scope.
- Complete the tailored questionnaire.
- Submit supporting evidence for expert analysis.
- Receive a scorecard with theme scores, strengths and improvement areas.
The supporting evidence is not optional decoration. EcoVadis generally awards credit where answers are backed by relevant documents that meet its evidence rules.
It also limits submissions to 55 documents. That is enough for a coherent management system and not enough for a document dump. Artificially combining unrelated files to get around the limit is prohibited.
The practical job is therefore to select evidence that is formal, current, relevant to the assessed scope and capable of proving more than one isolated statement.
How EcoVadis medals work in 2026
Medals are based on percentile rank across companies assessed by EcoVadis during the previous 12 months:
- Platinum: top 1%
- Gold: top 5%
- Silver: top 15%
- Bronze: top 35%
These are relative positions, not permanent score thresholds. A score that achieved Gold in one period may not achieve Gold later if the benchmark moves.
A company is also ineligible for a medal if any theme score is below 30. Certain severe findings, restrictions and 360° Watch results can affect eligibility as well. Medals and scorecards are generally valid for 12 months.
Treat a medal as the result of a functioning system, not the target around which the system is reverse-engineered. A packaging business that writes policies purely to reach a percentile is likely to struggle when customers ask for the evidence behind them.
Why packaging companies are examined closely
Packaging touches several issues that buyers can see immediately:
- Material use and source
- Recycled content
- Recyclability or compostability
- Chemicals and food-contact requirements
- Waste and production scrap
- Energy and emissions
- Forestry certification
- Labour conditions in manufacturing
- Supplier and converter traceability
It is also a category full of claims that sound simple but depend on conditions. "Recyclable" may depend on local collection and processing infrastructure. "Compostable" may mean industrial composting, home composting or neither unless a standard is specified. "Made with recycled content" needs a percentage, a material definition and evidence.
That makes packaging a useful test of whether sustainability is built into the business or sits in a marketing folder.
The evidence a packaging company should prepare
Environment
Useful evidence can include:
- An environmental policy covering the company's material impacts
- An environmental aspects and impacts assessment
- Energy, water, waste and greenhouse gas data
- Reduction targets with a baseline and reporting period
- Waste and scrap recovery programs
- Design guidelines for material reduction, reuse and recyclability
- Product carbon footprint or lifecycle assessment procedures
- Records of environmental incidents and corrective action
- ISO 14001 certification where relevant
The strongest evidence connects activity to coverage and results. "We reduce waste" is a weak statement. Monthly waste records, a defined reduction project and a measured reduction against a baseline are much more useful.
Labour and human rights
For manufacturers, this may include health and safety systems, training, incident data, working-hour controls and worker grievance processes.
For importers and distributors, the centre of gravity may move upstream:
- A human rights or modern slavery policy
- Supplier risk screening
- Factory social-audit reports
- Corrective action records
- Responsible recruitment controls
- A process for escalating high-risk findings
Buying from a supplier with an audit is not the same as having your own due-diligence process. EcoVadis is interested in how the assessed company selects, reviews and responds to suppliers.
Ethics
Relevant material may include:
- Code of conduct
- Anti-bribery and corruption policy
- Whistleblower or grievance channel
- Conflict-of-interest controls
- Competition-law and responsible-marketing training
- Data protection procedures
- Training and incident records
For packaging companies making environmental claims, claim approval can also be treated as a governance issue. Someone should be responsible for checking whether a claim is accurate, evidenced and appropriately qualified before it reaches a catalogue or label.
Sustainable procurement
This theme is often underestimated by distributors. A supplier code is a starting point, not a procurement system.
Stronger evidence may include:
- Supplier sustainability requirements
- Risk-based onboarding and review
- Certification and audit verification
- Product and material evidence requirements
- Purchasing coverage metrics
- Corrective actions and escalation
- Environmental and social criteria in supplier selection
- Performance reporting to management
For a packaging business, product data can make sustainable procurement measurable. You can track the share of relevant spend or sales covered by verified recycled content, recognised chain of custody, product footprints, current social audits or complete material records.
Seven ways to improve an EcoVadis score
1. Confirm the assessment scope
Check the exact legal entity, group or site being rated. Evidence must apply to that scope.
A group policy may help a subsidiary only if it clearly covers the entity and is implemented there. A plant audit may not demonstrate group-wide performance. If the scope is wrong, good evidence can look irrelevant.
EcoVadis also places limits on the standalone assessment of some purely commercial entities inside manufacturing groups. Resolve the scope before building the submission, not after it.
2. Read the previous scorecard as a work plan
Do not begin with the overall score. Begin with theme scores and improvement areas.
If one theme sits below 30, it blocks medal eligibility. If the scorecard repeatedly identifies missing coverage or reporting, another policy is unlikely to fix the problem. The business may need evidence that the policy is operating across enough facilities, suppliers or spend.
3. Build a policy-action-result chain
For every important topic, ask three questions:
- What have we committed to?
- What routine or project puts it into practice?
- What result can we measure?
For example:
- Policy: increase recycled inputs and reduce virgin material.
- Action: redesign selected product families and qualify alternative inputs.
- Result: percentage of material input that is post-consumer recycled, reported against a baseline.
That chain is much harder to fake and much easier for an assessor to follow.
4. Quantify coverage
Coverage turns a good example into a management system.
Measure what share of relevant activity is included:
- Percentage of sites covered by environmental data
- Percentage of supplier spend screened for sustainability risk
- Percentage of high-risk suppliers with current audits
- Percentage of packaging revenue with verified material composition
- Percentage of energy or greenhouse gas data covered by reporting
EcoVadis' 2026 methodology updates put more emphasis on evidence quality and coverage. Avoid relying on a pilot that represents a trivial slice of the assessed business.
5. Treat product evidence as operational data
Certificates stored in staff inboxes are difficult to verify, renew or report.
Create a controlled product record with:
- Saleable SKU and declared unit
- Product and distribution packaging weights
- Material composition
- Recycled-content percentage and source
- FSC, PEFC, GRS or other certification details
- Manufacturing site and country
- Product carbon footprint boundary and method
- Evidence owner, issue date and expiry date
This supports EcoVadis, but its real value appears elsewhere: tenders, customer questionnaires, product claims and design decisions.
6. Close actions before reassessment
EcoVadis' Corrective Action Plan feature helps allocate work and share progress with customers. Updating that plan does not change the existing scorecard. A new assessment is required for a new score.
Use the time between assessments to implement changes and collect evidence of operation. Reassessing immediately after writing a policy often buys an expensive confirmation that implementation is still missing.
7. Make ownership boringly clear
Every recurring requirement needs an owner and a review date. Someone should know:
- Who updates emissions data
- Who verifies supplier certificates
- Who closes factory corrective actions
- Who approves environmental claims
- Who checks evidence expiry
- Who assembles the next assessment
Sustainability programs become fragile when one enthusiastic employee acts as the human filing system.
Common mistakes
Uploading marketing material as evidence
A brochure may describe an initiative. It rarely proves governance, implementation and measured results.
Treating one certified range as company-wide performance
A certified paper line can be commercially valuable. It does not show how the company manages plastics, labour, ethics, emissions or the rest of its purchasing.
Confusing a medal with product certification
EcoVadis states that medals and badges are not product certifications and must not be presented as proof that a product is sustainable.
Reporting targets without baselines
"Reduce emissions by 30%" is incomplete without the scope, baseline year, target year and measurement method.
Waiting for the questionnaire
The best assessment preparation happens during normal operations. If the evidence has to be invented during the submission window, the underlying system probably needs work.
Where product-level data fits
EcoVadis helps a customer answer: "Does this supplier manage sustainability properly?"
Product-level data helps answer:
- What exactly is this pack made from?
- What is the footprint per 1,000 units?
- Which lifecycle stages are included?
- What proves the recycled-content claim?
- Is the certification current and linked to this product?
- How does the alternative compare on the same unit and boundary?
Packaging companies increasingly need both layers.
Zilch does not replace EcoVadis. It helps suppliers and distributors calculate, organise and share product-level sustainability data across catalogues, quotes, tenders and customer reports. That product system can also create much better evidence for the actions and results behind a broader sustainability program.
If your EcoVadis work is improving the company but your customers still cannot get reliable answers at SKU level, see how Zilch works for suppliers or book a call with the team.