How to Answer a Retailer's Sustainability Questionnaire

A large retailer, a marketplace, or a serious distributor will eventually send you a sustainability questionnaire. It arrives as a form with forty to two hundred questions, a deadline measured in days, and a note saying non-response is itself a finding.

Most of these forms can be answered in an afternoon if you know the sections. This page walks through them, and through the two answers that close accounts permanently.

Why they ask

Two reasons, and they are different:

• Regulatory. Reporting rules in the EU and increasingly in the US mean large companies must know their supply chain's impacts, not just their own operations. They gather the data from their suppliers because they are required to.
• Retail. A chain that has committed publicly to reducing its packaging footprint needs per-category data to track it.

Both mean the form is not an opportunity to look good. It is a data request. The useful mental model: you are not writing marketing, you are completing a table that someone will audit.

The sections you will actually get

Governance. Who is responsible? Most forms ask for the name and title of a person who owns the sustainability data, and whether that role exists. Naming a person is usually the cheapest question on the form and traders read its absence as a signal.

Environmental — materials. Input materials, any recycled content, and whether that content is documented.

Environmental — process. Energy, water and waste at the production site. Small suppliers often leave this blank. A blank here is read as "we do not know", which is safer than a guess but still slower to close.

Environmental — product end of life. Recyclability, materials of construction, and whether the packaging can be separated.

Social compliance. labour standards, working hours, health and safety, absence of child and forced labour, and whether an audit has been done.

Packaging. Packaging types, weight, recyclability, and sometimes recycled content percentages.

Certifications. Any third-party certification with its scope and issuing body.

The two answers that close an account

Be precise about these two. Both are checked.

• Documented recycled content. If you claim a percentage, the form usually asks for the basis. Claiming a figure you cannot evidence is a bigger problem than claiming nothing, because it makes the whole submission unreliable.
• Mandatory labour standards. If a form asks whether the site operates to applicable labour law and the answer would be anything other than yes — say no, and say what is being done. This is the section that ends relationships.

If an answer is not known, write "not known — here is the date we will have it". A dated commitment is treated very differently from a blank or a comforting guess.

Getting your factory to reply in time

The practical bottleneck is almost never the form. It is the factory, and the factory's own sub-contractors. What works:

• Send the form with the specific questions listed, not a forward of the PDF, and ask for a named response.
• Ask what they already have on file — certifications, audits, material declarations. Most have some and do not volunteer it.
• Ask for anything missing 10 days before your deadline, not the day before.
• Be willing to go back with a narrower question. "Please confirm in writing the recycled content percentage of the board" gets an answer; "please provide your full sustainability documentation" often does not.
• If a sub-contractor will not answer, say so in your submission. It is a shareable problem; a fabricated field is not.

What to send for a jewelry order

Concretely, for a stainless steel or jewelry box program, the answers usually include:

• Base material and alloy, per 316L vs 304 stainless steel
• Interior lining materials, per jewelry box materials
• Plating method and any coating thickness verification, from compliance and testing
• Packaging composition, and whether it can be separated for recycling
• Whether recycled content can be documented, and for which material
• Any certificates held (CE, RoHS, FCC), with scope

Where a question is about something we do not hold, the position we would recommend is to say so plainly and point to what we can evidence. If you need to know what we can and cannot document before you write, ask us with your RFQ — we will answer in writing rather than let you guess.

How long does a questionnaire take?

The form is usually a day. The data gathering behind it is the problem, which is why the deadline should be passed back to your factory immediately.

What if a supplier's answers are wrong?

Do not copy them. Ask again in writing, narrow the question, and if the answer does not come, say so in your submission rather than submitting a number you cannot support.

Do you have a completed questionnaire we could base ours on?

Ask us. We can tell you which sections we answer directly and which we would need to look up.

Can you provide an environmental product declaration?

For the certifications we hold, yes, per order. We do not produce EPDs for materials we do not supply, and we will not sign one we have not verified.

What counts as a certification on these forms?

Third-party certification with a named issuing body and a scope statement. A portfolio page is not a certification.

Next step

Tell us which questionnaire and which market. We will tell you what we can answer directly and what we would need to verify. Contact FSC CRAFT.

Related: How to verify an eco-friendly claim · Compliance and testing · Wholesale: MOQ, lead times and what to ask

← How to Verify an "Eco-Friendly" Claim Before You Buy

Part of the compliance and testing page: Replying to your buyer's form without inventing data.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should go in the answers?

Facts with names and dates: which material, which certification body, which standard, when the document was issued. A question answered with a named document survives an audit, while one answered with an adjective does not.

What should I refuse to sign?

A blanket environmental claim about a product line nobody has measured. If the form asks for a percentage or a standard, answer it for what was tested and leave the rest out rather than extending it to the untested range.

How long should the preparation take?

Long enough to read the whole form before answering. Most questionnaires repeat the same dozen questions in different words, so one pass over the document set answers two thirds of them.

What this means for your order

If you are still deciding, one thing decides this for you: whether you can answer from documents you already hold rather than from principles, as a questionnaire is an evidence test. Everything else on a quote page is presentation.

Where this falls short answering from intent, because a buyer's form will ask for the basis of each claim in the order the claim appears.

What to send us The form itself, and we will tell you which answers you can support with documents.