CorporateResponsibility.Net

Companies that put a single person in charge of sustainability programs are much more likely to get their employees behind the effort, according to a new survey of HR execs.

The survey, conducted by human resource firm Buck Consultants, finds that employee involvement in green programs dramatically increases when organizations appoint an individual to lead the efforts. For companies with at least three-quarters of their employees actively involved in green programs, 71% have appointed individual leaders whereas only 29% do not have such a leader. Read more

Source: Sustainable Life Media

Along with releasing the results of its third analysis at the weight and recyclability of supermarket packaging, the U.K.’s Local Government Association (LGA) is calling for retailers to help fund recycling efforts to reduce the financial burden of recycling and waste disposal from local governments.

The supermarkets and retail industry are pushing back, saying the latest War on Waste packaging study is flawed, doesn’t take into account the food waste that packaging prevents by preserving items and ignores the work that has been done so far to reduce packaging. Read more

Source: GreenBiz.com

Nearly two-thirds of informed publics (62%) trust corporations less than they did a year ago, according to the 10th Edelman Trust Barometer. When respondents in the United States were asked about trust in business in general, only 38% said they trust business to do what is right – a 20 percent plunge since last year – and only 17% said they trust information from a company’s CEO. Both are lower levels of trust than those Edelman measured in the wakes of Enron, the dot-com bust, and Sept.11.

Seventy-seven percent (77%) said they refused to buy products or services from a company they distrusted – the first time the survey explored people’s direct actions toward trusted and distrusted companies. Seventy-two percent (72%) criticized a distrusted company to a friend or colleague. Read more

Source: Edelman

Companies considering scaling back their sustainability initiatives in response to the economic downturn have today been urged to “think twice” after research released yesterday by consultancy giant AT Kearney showed that those businesses with the most effective green strategies tend to outperform their rivals financially.

The new study, entitled Green Winners: The Performance of Sustainability-focused Companies in the Financial Crisis, looked at 99 companies that feature on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and the Goldman Sachs SUSTAIN focus list of green companies, and assessed their stock price performance over the six months up to November last year. Read more

Source: Business Green

Four out of five people say they are still buying sustainable products and services today—which sometimes cost more—even in the midst of a U.S. recession, according to a new survey.

Half of the 1,000 people surveyed say they are buying just as many sustainable products now as before the economic downturn, while 19% say they are buying more sustainable products. 14% say they are buying fewer environmentally sustainable products. Read more

Source: Sustainable Business

Sun Microsystems has released an update to their 2008 CSR Report. Dave Douglas, Chief Sustainability Officer at Sun said that there where two main reasons for this update.

1. We want to make sure we were holding ourselves accountable throughout the (reporting) year – not just during the report process at the end of the year. Over the long term we would like to move toward a reporting model where we publish timely data throughout the year rather than just once a year in a neatly packaged report. By definition, some of the data is stale by then.
2. We’re trying to sharpen our internal processes around data collection and progress measurement. With some of the CSR reporting being new in the company, if you only do it once a year its easy to talk yourself into not automating the collection and reporting process. We think in the end we can report some data more often AND at lower cost.

Here is the link to the CSR Report update and the CEO message:

Update

CSO Message

Corporate Knights, the Canadian CSR magazine, has published its 2009 list of the 100 most sustainable corporations in the world.

The Global 100 is a list of publicly-traded, MSCI World-listed companies that are best equipped to manage the environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks and opportunities, based on research and analysis by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors. The Innovest methodology compares companies to their sector peers on a best-in-class basis.

CSR Europe members on the list include Accor, BASF, Coca-Cola Company, Groupe Danone, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, L’Oréal, Novo Nordisk, Panasonic, Procter & Gamble, SAP, State Street, Toyota Motor and Unilever. See the full list

Source: CSR Europe

A report published this week challenges the assumption that newly created green jobs will be “good,” middle-class jobs.

The report “High Road or Low Road: Job Quality in the New Green Economy,” authored by Good Jobs First and commissioned by Change to Win, Sierra Club, the Laborers’ International Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, examined existing green jobs in manufacturing, construction and waste-management. The research revealed wide variations in wages, benefits and labor conditions, with some green-collar jobs paying as little as $8.25 an hour without benefits. Read more

Source: Sustainable Business

One likes to think that humankind along with its creations is progressing rather than merely exploring different dimensions in an attempt to understand how we might and should live on this planet. Wouldn’t you agree? Think about universities. The first university, the university of Constantinopole, established in 425 was defined by research, teaching, academic independence and auto-administration.
Since then challenges, requirements and opportunities have multiplied and diversified. Besides cultivating brainpower, universities are now also expected to be centres for innovation, stimulate the economy and lead the “society’s efforts to achieve sustainability” (HEFCE: Sustainable development in Higher Education, 2005). Ultimately, universities should have a dual transformative role, i.e. unlocking the individual’s potential as well as improving a sense of collective wellbeing. This new vision of quality provides us with the opportunity “to demonstrate the full power and potential of higher education for the individual, for the economy, for the environment and for society” (New economics foundation: University Challenge: Towards a well-being approach to quality in higher education, 2008).
The wish list has certainly grown longer in the last 1600 years.
In terms of CSR, we live in interesting times. Just as businesses – who have been leaders in CSR – are winding down their CSR commitments in this economic downturn, universities are increasingly waking up to their CSR call. The second round of ‘Universities That Count’ benchmarking is currently taking place. Adapted from BITC’s CR index for the private sector, through the assessment exercise we now have an opportunity – for the first time in history – to understand holistically what our performance and impact as an institution is. I call this a progress. Until now, we’ve been defined by RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) and various other rankings focusing mainly on teaching and research, which, as necessary as they are, define us in a narrow way, especially in the light of this dual transformative role universities are envisaged as having.
This is a great moment for the HE sector to show leadership in CSR: as the private sector is withdrawing to their ‘quick cash-thinking’, universities as ‘higher places of learning’ can demonstrate the importance of CSR in advancing society’s development. Surely, challenges for businesses differ from those of the Higher Education sector. But maybe this is a key: our sector can provide new groundings for CSR and new innovative ways of ‘doing’ CSR through its own actions and research. Organisational development, models of self-governance, business education, behaviour change, citizenship… I hope developing CSR in the HE sector will lead to dialogue between the private and HE sector and will strengthen and broaden CSR for the whole society’s benefit and progress.

Article by Anne Raudaskoski