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Two U.S executives told a congressional panel that the country should encourage investment in efficiency and address climate change, perhaps by assigning a dollar cost to carbon emissions, Reuters reports.

John Rice, General Electric vice-chairman, and Daniel Esty, a professor of environmental law at Yale University both told the panel that cap-and-trade would be the best way to encourage investments in energy efficiency. George David, chairman of United Technologies Corp., declined to back the approach.

The European Union already covers over 1,000 industrial sites with a cap-and-trade system, but the U.S. Senate defeated efforts to adopt such a system last month.

Rice also told the panel that carbon capture and sequestration is technically viable today but not commercially viable and suggested the government to do more to help emerging energy technologies through tax credits. Read more

Source: Environmental Leader

Alternative energy, environmental marketing, reusing waste, personal sustainability – these are just a few of the issues affecting business sustainability that will become more important in the coming years.

The Institute for the Future has compiled these issues and more in the Map of Future Forces Affecting Sustainability, prepared for the Global Environmental Management Initiative.

The Map looks at six broad areas and lists what issues in those categories relate to people, regions, built environments, nature, markets, business and energy.

The six drivers influencing sustainability are, in the Map’s word: an imperative for looking long, a planet at risk, marginal populations redefine the mainstream, participatory culture drives change, new commons create new value and a new material world. Read more

Source. GreenBiz

Co-operative Travel has thrown down the gauntlet to other ethical and eco-travel agencies by becoming the first major operator in the industry to signal its opposition to the planned third runway at Heathrow.

The company, which is part of the Co-operative Group, outlined its opposition to the plans as part of a new environmental strategy, which also saw it commit to attain carbon neutrality across its business operations and expand its portfolio of overland travel options.

Speaking to BusinessGreen.com, environment manager at the Co-operative Group Chris Shearlock admitted that there was a risk the company could be impacted financially if UK runway capacity is not expanded, but he argued that to support expansion would run counter to the firm’s environmental policies and brand image.

“It is obvious we can’t reduce carbon emissions to required levels and continue to expand aviation at the current rate, the maths just don’t add up” he said. “It is brave for a travel business to say that, because the others are just sticking their heads in the sand – we’re the first to acknowledge there is an inherent problem here.” Read more

Source: Business Green

UK food retailer Sainsbury’s has won the European Retail Solutions Best Green IT Initiative Award 2008 for using simultaneous two-sided thermal receipt printers from NCR Corporation in its store checkouts.

Last year Sainsbury’s became the first European retailer to start using the new printers, which use over 40 percent less paper. Printing on both sides of the receipt simultaneously not only saves paper, but also the energy associated with producing and transporting it.

By the end of this year, consumers will be receiving the two-sided receipts from 7,000 checkouts in approximately half of Sainsbury’s 823 UK stores resulting in a savings of 502,000 paper rolls per year – cutting receipt paper usage at the retailer by around two-fifths. Read more

Source: Environmental Leader

Businesses will have to pay to pollute under Australian government proposals for a carbon emissions trading scheme.

Senator Penny Wong, minister for climate change and water, this month unveiled a Green Paper on the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

She told the National Press Club in Canberra: “The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is a response to climate change that is economically responsible, supports families and prepares Australia for our future challenges.”

She explained that climate change threatened not only food production, agriculture and water supplies but the country’s multi-billion dollar tourism industry, built on such icons as the Great Barrier Reef and the Kakadu wetlands. Read more

Source: edie News

by Robert Barnard-Weston, 2008

So, once again, we’re in an economic downturn. After almost twenty years in Corporate  Responsibility (CR), I’ve seen several of these already and they always seem to trigger the same response among corporate leaders. Those who are not doing anything decisive in CR tend to defer any plans they may have had while they wait for the economic climate to improve. Those who are already doing something have a habit of curtailing their CR activities or cancelling them altogether.

What this clearly demonstrates is that CR is seen by most as a luxury, a ‘nice to have’ element of their corporate tactics. It is a cost that cannot be justified when the economic going gets tough, since it doesn’t yield a worthwhile return on investment (ROI).

There are two very important issues here that corporate leaders ignore at their peril:

1. Under company law in most industrialised countries, a prime requirement of senior executives is that they provide maximum returns for their investors. Therefore, those who have been operating CR programmes while knowing ROI was shaky or non-existent have been breaking the law.

2. CR programmes, appropriately designed, implemented and managed, can be extremely powerful and reliable profit and shareholder value boosters. Astonishingly, very few business leaders seem to realise this.

So, the conclusions from these facts, particularly in an economic downturn, are clear: if your CR programme is not commercially successful, end it now or make changes so that it becomes commercially successful. If you don’t have a CR programme, now is a very good time to launch one if it can add profits and shareholder value.

There are three essential, inter-related disciplines required to make CR improve your financial numbers:

a. appropriate CR strategy

b. integrated communication

c. dedicated measurement systems

An Appropriate CR Strategy is one that is aligned completely with the overarching  corporate strategy. It does not require (indeed, it should avoid) trite vision statements and homilies from the Chairman at the front of the Annual Report. It requires a clear understanding of precisely what the organisation exists to achieve and careful articulation for all stakeholders of what CR can contribute to that achievement.

Integrated CR Communication differs from most communication programmes that we have seen in that it combines several core characteristics:

· It brings to bear both interpersonal and artefact-based communications

· It makes full use of both internal and external communications

· It is dialogue-based, not monologue-based

· It is iterative – building over time to achieve metamorphic performances

All four of these criteria must be met for integrated CR communications systems to deliver their benefits. When they do, the results can be staggering in their potency.

A Dedicated CR Measurement System provides a means of bringing together tangible and intangible benefits, quantitative and qualitative analysis, into a cohesive, easily understood picture which shows clearly the financial benefits that a CR programme has activated.

For the system to deliver optimal results, all three of the above disciplines need to be deployed simultaneously in a ‘tuned whole’. CR strategy alone tends to be seen as empty promises, lacking substance; CR communications without strategy and measurement is meaningless; and the best measurement systems are of no use if there’s nothing to measure.

The ‘tuned whole’ that results from appropriate design and delivery of an integrated CR strategy, communication and measurement system can be likened to a highly trained athlete. The athlete needs to be laser-focused on the goal in mind: no amount of fitness wins the gold medal if you veer away from the racetrack. All the body’s organs need to be in the best of health – if any one of them fails, the whole system goes down – and dialogue between the heart, the lungs and the other organs needs to fast, accurate and complete. Finally, we need to know when we’ve achieved our goals – for every event, there’s a finishing line at a carefully measured distance from the starting blocks.

Pass that finishing line first and you win gold for everyone concerned.

The author, Robert Weston lives with in Bath, England. He has been a CSR consultant, writer, speaker and facilitator for fifteen years. He holds degrees in Philosophy and in Responsibility and Business Practice; he has also co-launched the UK farmers’ markets movement, Bath’s first eco-hotel and five children. His clients include a wide range of high-profile corporations, along with numerous NGOs, government departments, national governments and supragovernmental organisations.
You can e-mail him at: robert@organismics.org or call him on +44 7074 661166
You can write to him at the following address:
Bloomfield House,
146, Bloomfield Road,
Bath. BA2 2AS, UK

Marks & Spencer has cut the amount of plastic bags it hands out by around 80% following its decision earlier this year to charge customers 5p per bag.

The retail giant said it had given out 70 million fewer bags over the last 10 weeks compared to the equivalent period last year.

The news is a welcome boost for M&S, which announced the policy in March as part of its Plan A eco-drive.

Announcing the initiative, chief executive Sir Stuart Rose had said: “If M&S customers right across the UK cut the number of bags they used by 70%, they would save more than 280 million bags every year.” Read more

Another story on that topic: BusinessGreen

Source: TheGrocer.co.uk

By Miriam Katz
This article will be part of a series on nuclear power. Nuclear power is starting to have a renaissance due to decreased availability of fossil fuels, environmental concerns, and climate change. According to the World Nuclear Association, China is planning to increase sixfold the amount of electricity it derives from nuclear plants by 2020. There is also talk in the UK of more nuclear power plants. Given this latter fact, it is important to look at the start of nuclear power in the UK.

On the 17^th of October, 1956, the Queen unveiled the world’s first commercial nuclear power plant, Calder Hall at 12:16 PM. Calder Hall was situated on the west coast of Cumbria, 15 miles from the town of Workington. Workington was the first town in the UK to receive electricity because of nuclear power. Within 4 hours, according to the BBC, the power had reached London via the national grid. Calder Hall is a relatively small nuclear plant with just 40 megawatts (MW) of electricity generated at a cost of £35 million. Modern nuclear power plants can generate more than 1200 MW. In fact, much of the generation at Calder Hall was actually heat that was used on site. Calder Hall also produced hypodermic needles and radio cobalt for cancer treatment.

Calder Hall was the first reactor to use the magnox technology, which meant that the fuel cans were made out of magnesium alloy. One of the most important things about this technology was that unenriched uranium was used, which meant two things: firstly, refueling had to happen very often and secondly, there was very little pressure inside, meaning that an explosion was extremely unlikely. This occurred because the coolant for the reactor was gas, unlike the Chernobyl plant, which used steam. However, despite these positive attributes, magnox plants also emitted a high amount of radiation. At the Dungeness plant in Kent, which also used the magnox technology, people in nearby areas were exposed to half as much radiation as recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.

In 2003, the Calder Hall plant was closed. The decommissioning process will take approximately 100 years, according to the Guardian. The decommissioning process is divided up into three stages. The first stage, which takes ten years, involves the removal of the buildings such as the cooling towers and workshops. After this, the building has to sit for about 100 years in order for radiation levels to drop to safe levels. Then, the third stage involves the removal of the reactors. The total cost of this is approximately £1 billion. Across the UK, decommissioning is expected to cost around £73 billion; however, costs will most likely go up as the nuclear waste with the highest amount of radioactivity is retrieved. This type of nuclear waste cannot be retrieved by workers and thus, robotic arms are used.

One the main issues of decommissioning is what to do with the waste. According to the David Suzuki Foundation in Canada, nuclear waste can stay dangerous for up to 250,000 years. There is still not any proven way to dispose of it safely. The British government has suggested a geological facility, which entails putting the waste deep inside a rock formation. However, there are many concerns about monitoring the waste and whether the waste might seep out. This solution has also been proposed in Canada, but it has yet to be tried in any country.

Thus concludes the first article on nuclear power in this series, which will contain three articles. The second will concern the financial costs of nuclear power plants and the third will examine the environmental aspects of nuclear power, including the emission of greenhouse gases.

This article has been written by Miriam Katz. Miriam is a member of The Sustainability Writers Network (TSWN).

SocialFunds.com — ArcelorMittal, Citigroup, Chevron, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), ExxonMobil, Nestlé, Samsung, Shell, Total, and Wal-Mart were red-flagged by ECOFACT as the most controversial companies in the world. The companies were routinely in the news and criticized by non-governmental organizations in the first half of this year.
The Reputational Risk Index (RRI) by ECOFACT’s RepRisk tool ranks companies on negative press and criticism from NGOs on labor, environmental and corruption issues. The top social and environmental issues these ten companies were criticized for during the previous six months were human rights abuses and corporate complicity and negative impact on communities and ecosystems.

The RRI is designed to help investors gauge a company’s relationship to controversial issues and the risks associated with them.

Source: SocialFunds.com

This weeks interview is with Anne Gadegaard Larson from the Stakeholder Relations Department of Novo Nordisk, a global healthcare company and a world leader in diabetes care based in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The interview:

1)    Could you tell us a little bit about the history of CR reporting at Novo Nordisk?

Novo Nordisk published its first environmental report in 1994 (covering the year 1993), and was the first company in Denmark and one of the first internationally to do so. This was one year ahead of Danish legislation requiring that certain companies (in total around 2,000 at the time) disclose information about their environmental impacts. The report included information about resource consumption, emissions and use of experimental animals – issues that reflected stakeholder concerns at the time, and indeed still do. Since then, the company has continued to set new targets every year aimed at raising environmental and bioethical standards in the company’s operations. Reporting helps maintain focus and create transparency about environmental impacts, performance and goals.

In 1998 Novo Nordisk published its first social report. The report set targets and followed up on the company’s efforts to live up to its social responsibility – towards employees and as a corporate citizen.

In 1999 these two supplementary reports were merged into one document, the environmental and social report. In addition, since mandatory environmental reporting remains applicable for some of the company’s Danish sites (Bagsværd, Gentofte, Hillerød and Kalundborg), annual green accounts are prepared for these sites and submitted to the Danish Commerce and Companies Agency.

In November 2000 the enzyme business was demerged from the healthcare company, and the two businesses continued as two separately listed companies, Novozymes A/S and Novo Nordisk A/S. The ownership structure remained unchanged, and a holding company, Novo A/S, was established as the link between the Novo Nordisk Foundation and the operating businesses. That is why the 2000 environmental and social report is published under the name of Novo A/S, covering performance for both companies.

As of 2001 Novo Nordisk began to include socio-economics, and the 2001 report was entitled ‘reporting on the Triple Bottom Line’. The Triple Bottom Line approach has guided the company’s development of its sustainability agenda, and from 2001 the company became more proactive – internally and externally – in ‘branding’ this Triple Bottom Line concept as its interpretation of sustainable development.

In 2002 and 2003 the company’s voluntary reporting on environmental, social and economic performance and key issues was published in Sustainability reports. In 2003, for the first time, the Sustainability Report was published at the same as the Annual Financial Report and distributed to shareholders. This move was very well received by shareholders and other stakeholders, as the two documents together provided a more comprehensive overview of the company’s performance, progress, positions and strategic initiatives.

In March 2004 the Annual General Meeting adopted an amendment to the company’s Articles of Association to specify in the objectives that the company will ‘strive to conduct its activities in a financially, environmentally and socially responsible way’. In this way, the commitment to the Triple Bottom Line (which was already included in the Novo Nordisk Way of Management) was further anchored as a business principle.

In order to reflect this approach, Novo Nordisk merged its financial report and its sustainability report into one inclusive document. The 2004 Annual Report was the first inclusive report and, although recognised as a ‘beta version’ of a more comprehensive approach to reporting, it was very well received.

Novo Nordisk has a long track record as a leader in sustainability reporting. In 2007 – for the eleventh time – Novo Nordisk’s Annual Report 2006 was awarded ‘best non-financial annual report’ by the Danish association of state-authorised accountants, FSR, and the business daily, Børsen.

In addition, Novo Nordisk won the award for ‘best Corporate Responsibility report’ issued in Denmark in 2006 and an award for second-best online information amongst C20-index companies.

In March 2008, Novo Nordisk was selected as the winner of the first-ever, global CR Reporting Award for best integrated report.

See all reports here

2)    Novo Nordisk has won a lot of CR awards for their reporting over the course of the past 10 years. What do you do different then other companies?

Novo Nordisk has chosen to report on the company’s financial and non-financial performance in one inclusive document, the Annual Report, which is published in English and Danish.

Novo Nordisk continues the process to drive integration of the financial and non-financial perspectives on business and seeks to reflect this in the approach to reporting. In the absence of global standards for inclusive reporting, this approach takes its point of departure in current standards for mandatory financial reporting and current guidelines for voluntary non-financial reporting. The aim is to drive business performance and enhance shareholder value by exploring the interactions between financial and non-financial objectives. This entails alignment of key priorities, target-setting and definition of key performance indicators, in consultation with internal and external stakeholders.

We recognise the challenges of reporting within two distinctly different frameworks. However, we deem that the benefits of presenting one view of the company’s performance outweigh the drawbacks, and we are continuously working to improve disclosure and transparent reporting.

The Annual Report is prepared in respect of current best practice and the principles of materiality, completeness and responsiveness. Stakeholder engagement informs the process, which also incorporates independent expert reviews of the company’s annual reporting. The selection of information included in the annual reporting reflects evolving priorities in response to business and societal challenges.

3)    What is your opinion on stakeholder engagement? Will companies ever be able to properly communicate to their stakeholders? What does Novo Nordisk do?

Stakeholder engagement is a key principle of corporate responsibility – it helps an organisation stay attuned to stakeholders’ concerns and interests, and it is a key element of organisational learning and development. Any organisation wishing to work and report proactively on corporate responsibilities needs to define whom to engage with and how. It is important to recognise that stakeholder engagement is not just the annual meeting with the local NGO, but regular contact either directly or indirectly through media, formal or informal, with top management or on an individual employee level. Therefore stakeholder engagement is not to be perceived as a process that can be managed in its completeness by a central department. However, it is important to secure coordination of engagements with key stakeholders.

The SR report has for some years been one way to communicate with stakeholders. Novo Nordisk’s learning has been that also other communication channels need to be developed, as stakeholders’ interests are very diverse. The annual reporting on our sustainability website therefore serves as a reporting repository through which all stakeholders can find updated information on Novo Nordisk’s performance in regards to their key area of interest. This is supplemented with updates during the year on specific topics.

4)    Where is CR reporting at Novo Nordisk going in the future? What are the priorities?

Novo Nordisk’s reporting strategy considers developments in reporting standards and regulatory initiatives. We recognise that, unlike financial reporting whose format is now well-established by international standards, sustainability reporting is still at a stage of experimentation. We believe that with the approach to integrated reporting we are getting closer to a reporting format that works well for Novo Nordisk, our shareholders and other stakeholders. However, we will continue to seek inspiration from reader and stakeholder feedback, independent external reviews and benchmarks with peer reporting.

As part of this work, Novo Nordisk is working to develop more long-term non-financial targets, indicators and metrics.

5)    Where do you think CR reporting is going in the next 5-10 years? Will it be more important for companies in the future then now?

Novo Nordisk believes in the value of integrated reporting and predicts that in 5 to 10 years financial and non-financial reporting will have blended into truly inclusive reporting. The reports will convey information thatthe organisation’s stakeholders regard as material for their decision-making, whether it is about engaging with the company as an investor, a potential new employee, an authority or other.

In Denmark, authorities are currently discussing whether the regulatory requirements to the annual report should be expanded from reporting on material environment and knowledge information to a broader requirement that all larger Danish companies should produce a CR report. We see the same trend in other countries.

6)    What would be your top 5 CR reporting tips to someone new managing CR reporting within a business?

Novo Nordisk’s top 5 CR reporting tips are:
1.    Make sure to have a robust CR strategy in place, which will serve as the point of departure for reporting, and set clear, communicable targets and indicators that are meaningful to the organisation and which can drive performance
2.    Make sure that the CR reporting is balanced
3.    Involve stakeholders in the reporting as well as the shaping of the CR strategy – including selection of material issues to report
4.    Assure CR content according to the AA1000AS
5.    Have fun while developing the CR report. It IS a huge effort, but it’s worth it!