Protect&Sustain - The Global Fertilizer Industry Product Stewardship Initiative

Five Steps to Certification

This site presents a roadmap to becoming a certified IFA Product Steward. (See Product Stewardship: the Value Proposition).

We have broken down the process into five essential steps:

1. Registration 

2. Research

3. Self-assessment

4. Validation of your self-assessment 

5. Certification as an IFA Product Steward.

So get involved ...

Appoint a Product Stewardship Coordinator

From the outset, this programme encourages every participating organization to nominate a leader, or a product steward "champion". This champion's role is to coordinate the implementation of product stewardship within their organization.

• Overall responsibility for introducing and running the product stewardship within the organization
• Active promoter of the benefits of product stewardship and the main contact within the organization
• Main liaison between the organization and the IFA Secretariat

Sign Up: IFA's Protect & Sustain product stewardship initiative is easier to join than to say! This site makes it easy. Clicking this button will take you to a simple step-by-step guide for registering and developing your organization's own product stewardship programme.

Read Up: Some background reading and preparation may be useful. Get to know the philosophy and approach while familiarizing yourself with some global practices in this area. Links to all the necessary resources are in the 5-step plan. There are guidelines for each of the key stages of the lifespan and of the management cycle.

Assess your operations: Then there is the Evaluation Tool - designed to help assess your organization’s strengths and weaknesses - and to eventually benchmark your overall progress.

This step will help guide your organization to a point where it should feel confident that product stewardship practices are of such a standard that they are worthy of approval and recognition by the outside world.

And finally, showcase your performance ... !

The IFA Protect & Sustain programme offers a phased methodology for gaining official recognition for achieving high-quality product stewardship practices.

Your organization has established a product stewardship programme, and has benchmarked and reviewed its performance - and where necessary – has introduced new processes or improved existing ones. Once your organization’s performance exceeds certain pre-defined levels, it is then eligible for external audit and accreditation.

To begin with, there is a preliminary validation phase. If you believe that your organization exceeds the required performance levels, you will have the chance to have your assessment form reviewed by a professional external assessor.

Finally, when your organization’s self-evaluation is validated as exceeding the required performance levels, you are a step away from gaining full accreditation under the IFA programme. Through third-party site visits of your operations, your organization can then be certified as an IFA Product Steward or as an IFA Product Steward Excellence.

Read on...

Protect&Sustain's validation, auditing and accreditation partners