Corporate sustainability

Society’s understanding of environmental and ethical issues is becoming increasingly sophisticated and values are changing.

People now expect businesses to uphold high ethical values and make significant contributions to a sustainable future.

The challenge for business is to identify their key sustainability issues - climate change, labour issues in the supply chain, resource scarcity - and take steps to meaningfully address these issues to create opportunities around sustainable products and services.

Those businesses that fail to do this, or treat sustainability solely as a public relations exercise could ultimately risk their own licence to operate.

The businesses that engage with the sustainability agenda create opportunities for new markets, lower risks, greater efficiencies and increased loyalty from customers, employees and business partners alike.

People – your staff, your partners and your consumers – now judge your business on your values, as well as your value.

Increasing loyalty to ‘ethical’ brands and trust for companies that identify, address and communicate their social and environmental responsibilities is higher than ever with over 35% of people in the UK seeking out information on a company’s reputation in 2008* and punishing companies according to the perception of corporate values and ethical practice with 57% of UK citizens avoiding a product or service as a result of a poor corporate reputation*.

Your workforce take their values to the workplace every day and want their employer to attain high and visible standards of corporate behaviour. Your sustainability programme can lead to increased passion and drive from your people.

Most global companies already understand corporate sustainability and are looking down their supply chain, asking where the environmental and social risks are. Suppliers that can foresee these challenges can strengthen relationships and create opportunities with those companies already addressing these issues.

Corporate sustainability is no longer an option; it’s a necessary part of business that is good for your organisation, and good for society.

*The Ethical Consumerism Report 2008. The Cooperative Bank.

The Streets are Paved with Joules

We love Pavegen. Paving that turns the kinetic energy from footsteps into electrical energy to power low energy devices such as LED lighting. Imagine the potential in a school playground, or in a busy airport terminal. Innovative and fun*!

The illuminated rubber slabs are currently being trialed in London's East End. Check them out next time you're out for a Jane Fonda.

*Provided the lithium batteries don't explode, or the energy is not used to power CCTV cameras.

Emission mission

We've signed up for 10:10. That means we've committed to cut our emissions by 10% in 2010. It means we're doing what we are always telling our clients to do!

Our emissions in 2008 were 2 tonnes CO2. That covers our energy use, business travel and staff/contractor commuting. As you may expect, we are already pretty good at minimising our energy use, but it's fun to have a real focus.

As we expand the business in the coming months it's going to be a challenge to reduce the absolute emissions by 10%, but where there is a will there is a way. We'll publish more about the steps we are going to take to reach our target shortly.

Words and Pictures

Communicating environmental issues with just words isn't always the most engaging way of getting the point across. Most environmental impacts can be witnessed so it makes sense to use images to communicate what is going on. This advert for WWF by TBWA says it all. (via Design Yak). It would be great to see more corporate sustainability reports using images to communicate negative impacts in the same way that positive images (like the ubiquitous pics of smiling kids benefiting from the corporation's philatropy) are used.

Ray Anderson on Corporate Sustainability

Please stop putting a prefect badge on the school bully.

At Blackbird Towers this week we were discussing the tricky business of offering “Sustainability Partner” and similarly branded sponsorship opportunities.

Such an arrangement could create some really meaningful initiatives, changes and reputation benefits if managed well by people who understand sustainability. The tag could also end up being an unsustainable PR disaster for all involved.

It is important for businesses to disclose and communicate real improvements in their environmental and social impacts and partnerships can help achieve this. By nature business will want to ensure maximum “bang for buck”. But the brand must be reasonable; it must be proportionate to the overall level of meaningful achievement and reflect the company’s overall transparency and contribution to sustainability.

Take EDF’s arrangement as Sustainability Partner with London 2012. OK, so EDF have made some effort to reduce their environmental impacts and I am sure their funding will help the London Olympics to be ‘greener’ in some way. It is also true that in creating valuable energy, EDF’s operation’s produce a significant actual amount of nuclear waste, and they are big, big players in coal – one of the most unsustainable fuels.

So it’s a bit much for EDF to adopt (and apply to trademark) a green Union Flag for promotional purposes – especially when it has already been adopted by a real sustainable energy company. Not only are EDF pinning the prefect badge on their own lapel, they are first nicking it from the good people at Ecotricity, who are understandably peeved (read more here). Neither EDF, nor London 2012 would appreciate their branding being messed with.

In my NGO days the boss would say to me (when we were working with a particularly 'bad' company) that our sustainability influence was nudging the tiller of the corporate super tanker – well that’s fine when you know what your doing and where your going – and we did. But a warning to the ad men. An inexperienced someone was nudging the tiller on the Exxon Valdes when it ran aground in Prince William Sound.

Choose fish.