If a corporate customer has asked your promotional products business for an EcoVadis scorecard, they are not asking whether your drink bottle contains recycled stainless steel. They are asking whether your company has a credible system for managing sustainability.
That distinction matters.
EcoVadis can be valuable for promotional product suppliers and distributors selling to large corporate and government buyers. It gives customers a recognised way to assess your policies, actions and results across sustainability. But it is a company-level rating. It does not prove that an individual product is sustainable, nor does it provide the product-level carbon, sourcing or material data a buyer may need for a tender or Scope 3 inventory.
The best approach is to understand exactly what EcoVadis assesses, build the evidence properly and avoid treating the medal as the end of the job.
What is EcoVadis?
EcoVadis assesses the quality of a company's sustainability management system. Its methodology looks at three management pillars — policies, actions and results — across four themes:
- Environment
- Labour and human rights
- Ethics
- Sustainable procurement
The questionnaire is not identical for every business. EcoVadis adjusts it according to the company's activity, size and operating location. A promotional products importer with 20 employees should not expect the same questionnaire as a multinational manufacturer.
The process has four broad stages: registration, questionnaire, expert analysis and results. Your answers need to be supported by formal documents. EcoVadis then produces a score from 0 to 100, theme scores, strengths and improvement areas.
This is a rating, not a product certification. EcoVadis itself is explicit that its medals and badges do not mean a company's products are sustainable and must not be used to make product-level environmental claims.
That means "we have an EcoVadis medal" and "this notebook is the more sustainable choice" are two completely different claims. The first may be supported by your scorecard. The second needs evidence about the notebook.
How EcoVadis medals work in 2026
EcoVadis medals are now based on percentile rank rather than a fixed score threshold. Your business is compared with all companies assessed by EcoVadis over the previous 12 months, across industries.
- Platinum: top 1%
- Gold: top 5%
- Silver: top 15%
- Bronze: top 35%
There is no permanent "Gold score" to aim for. The threshold can move as the assessed population changes.
There are also minimum conditions. A company cannot receive a medal if any of its four theme scores is below 30. EcoVadis' 360° Watch findings and certain industry restrictions can also affect eligibility. Scorecards and medals are valid for 12 months.
For companies outside the medal bands, EcoVadis currently offers a Committed badge for scores of at least 45 and a Fast Mover badge for businesses scoring 34–44 that improve by at least six points within 18 months, subject to its other rules.
These rules change periodically, so check the current EcoVadis medal and badge guidance before setting an internal target.
Why EcoVadis matters in promotional products
Promotional products sit in an awkward part of the supply chain. The spend can look minor to a large buyer, but the reputational risk is highly visible. A cheap item carrying a customer's logo can raise questions about waste, labour conditions, recycled content, chemicals, product safety and where it was made.
Corporate procurement teams therefore want confidence in two things:
- Is this a responsible supplier?
- Is this a suitable product?
EcoVadis primarily helps answer the first question. A strong scorecard can reduce duplicated supplier questionnaires, support tender responses and show customers that your sustainability program extends beyond an "eco range".
But buyers increasingly ask the second question as well. They want evidence attached to the SKU: material composition, recycled content, certifications, country of manufacture, emissions, packaging and end-of-life information. EcoVadis does not create that product record for you.
What evidence should a promotional products company prepare?
The biggest mistake is writing a stack of policies immediately before the submission and expecting a strong result. A policy shows intent. EcoVadis also looks for implementation and results.
Your evidence should show a logical chain:
We made a commitment → we took action → we measured what happened.
For a promotional products business, useful evidence may include the following.
Environment
- An environmental policy covering the material issues in your operations and supply chain
- A corporate greenhouse gas inventory and reduction targets
- Waste, energy, freight and packaging reduction initiatives
- A process for collecting product composition and environmental information
- Records showing how environmental criteria influence product selection
- Product carbon footprints or lifecycle information for priority ranges
- Reporting against environmental targets
Labour and human rights
- Employee policies and grievance processes
- Health and safety procedures and records
- Modern slavery and human rights policies
- Factory social audit reports where relevant
- Corrective action records
- A process for identifying higher-risk products, materials and sourcing locations
Ethics
- A code of conduct
- Anti-bribery and corruption controls
- Whistleblower and grievance channels
- Data protection practices
- Training records and evidence of implementation
Sustainable procurement
- A supplier code of conduct
- Supplier onboarding and risk-screening procedures
- Supplier sustainability questionnaires
- Evidence of audits, certifications and corrective actions
- Procurement targets and performance reporting
- A method for keeping supplier and product evidence current
EcoVadis limits the number of supporting documents and applies rules about what counts as valid evidence. Its April 2026 document guide includes a 55-document limit, so the answer is not to upload everything your company has ever produced. Use documents that are current, formal, relevant to the assessed entity and broad enough to demonstrate actual coverage.
How to improve your EcoVadis score
1. Start with the scope
Confirm which legal entity, group or site is being assessed. A policy belonging to the parent company may not prove implementation in the entity named on the scorecard. Equally, a site-level document may not demonstrate group-wide coverage.
This sounds administrative, but getting the scope wrong can undermine an otherwise good submission.
2. Use your industry risk profile
EcoVadis activates criteria based on your industry, activity, size and location. Review the industry risk profile before deciding where to spend time. A distributor, importer and manufacturer will have different material issues.
For promo companies, sustainable procurement and human rights are likely to demand real attention because so much of the product impact sits upstream with factories and material suppliers.
3. Fix the weakest theme first
If one theme is below 30, your business is not eligible for a medal regardless of the overall result. That makes the weakest theme commercially important.
Do not spend six months polishing an already-strong environmental policy while sustainable procurement has no supplier screening, targets or results. Start with the scorecard's highest-priority improvement areas and the gaps that constrain recognition.
4. Turn policies into operating routines
A supplier code that nobody uses is weak evidence. A supplier code that is issued during onboarding, acknowledged by suppliers, supported by risk screening and followed by corrective action records is much stronger.
The same applies to climate. A target without an inventory is difficult to manage. An inventory without actions is just measurement. A strong system connects the target, data, action plan and reported result.
5. Measure coverage
Evidence becomes more credible when it shows scale. How many active suppliers have accepted your code? What share of spend has been screened? How many high-risk factories have current audits? What proportion of catalogue revenue has verified material data?
"We assess suppliers" is a claim. "We screened suppliers representing 82% of annual purchasing spend and opened corrective actions for every high-risk result" is a management system.
6. Build product data into sustainable procurement
Promo businesses often stop at supplier credentials. That leaves a large gap between an approved supplier and the thousands of products sold by that supplier.
Build a repeatable process to collect and maintain:
- Product and packaging weights
- Material composition
- Recycled-content evidence
- Relevant product certifications
- Country of manufacture
- Factory and social-audit evidence
- Product carbon footprint data
- End-of-life assumptions and limitations
This information can strengthen the actions and reporting behind your sustainability program. More importantly, it makes the work useful to sales teams and customers rather than trapping it inside an annual assessment.
7. Use the Corrective Action Plan, then reassess
EcoVadis provides a Corrective Action Plan feature that turns scorecard improvement areas into actions. Use it to assign owners, record progress and collaborate with customers.
However, updating the plan does not change the current scorecard. EcoVadis only updates the score after reassessment. Build enough implementation evidence before using your next assessment credit.
What EcoVadis will not solve
EcoVadis is a good answer when a buyer asks, "What is your company's sustainability rating?"
It is not a complete answer when the buyer asks:
- What is the carbon footprint of these 5,000 units?
- Is this specific garment lower impact than the alternative?
- What evidence supports the recycled-content claim?
- Can you put product emissions into our quote or invoice?
- Can we use this data in our Scope 3 inventory?
Those questions require product-level information with a clear unit, boundary, methodology and evidence trail.
Where Zilch fits
Zilch and EcoVadis solve different layers of the problem.
EcoVadis assesses the company's sustainability management system. Zilch helps promotional product suppliers and distributors calculate, organise and share sustainability information at SKU level across catalogues, tenders, quotes, invoices and product pages.
Using both can make sense. EcoVadis gives procurement confidence in the supplier. Zilch gives the buyer information about what they are actually purchasing.
If your customers are starting to ask product questions that your EcoVadis scorecard cannot answer, see how Zilch works for distributors or book a call with the team.