Microsoft says it will start requiring some suppliers to provide annual sustainability disclosures starting in 2013.

About a dozen of its key vendors will be notified about the new reporting process in the coming months, Microsoft said.

Microsoft, of course, sells relatively little hardware, most famously its Xbox video game system. (It pulled the plug on the Zune media players earlier this year.) Celestica, Flextronics and Wistron have been some of the xBox manufacturers, and Flextronics also built the Peabody mobile phone platform, and Flex and Hitachi have worked on Kinect. So we have a pretty good idea of who will be on the receiving end of those first phone calls.