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.