The seven dwarves must have a fairly large carbon footprint. For a start, they work in mining, which isn’t exactly well known for environmental credentials and they’re also a decidedly small business.
Apparently, insurer AXA reckons small businesses are absolutely chucking out carbon - some 110 tonnes every year it reckons.
And they’re not daft about their climate consequences either - 55 percent of SMEs told AXA they’re contributing to global warming.
So what are they doing about it? Not overly much, you might be forgiven for thinking.
Six percent have green energy suppliers, 36 percent recycle, 25 percent use “environmentally friendly” products and a similar percentage have been prodding staff to cut energy use.
Apparently, that’s working about as well a solar powered torch, or a Kentish Job Centre employee.
Another SME survey, this time sponsored by E.ON (PR surveys are like crack to Greenbang at the moment), says two fifths of staff aren’t toeing the company line and following green policies.
A rather sweet little nugget from that self-same survey said that 58 percent of employees could be encouraged to make green changes to their office lifestyle with ‘financial incentives’.
Vodafone is going on a carbon cutting mission, taking a great big carbon coloured knife to its emissions. Big Red has its sights set on trimming half the carbon off its baseline (it’s a veritable game of carbon tennis!) of 1.23 million tonnes by 2020.
Thankfully, it’s not turning to the usual ‘we’re going to plant a few more trees and turn off our kettles’ but is instead going for more investment in renewables as well as doing more work on its energy efficiency. So there might be a bit of kettle-switching off, then.
The mobile operator also reckons it’ll be encouraging its users to take up products that cut down on their own emissions - like “solar-powered phone chargers and universal phone chargers for Vodafone-branded handsets”. Would a universal charger for all mobiles be too much to ask? Would it? Harrumph.
Anyway, here’s more from the folk at Newbury:
We have reviewed the options, including carbon off-setting, and have concluded that the most effective strategy is to cut our CO2 emissions directly. There are no simple solutions to what is a complex challenge, but through operational changes and technological innovation we will focus on improving energy efficiency in our networks, which account for 80% of our emissions. We will use renewable energy when and where we can.
Give computers too much intelligence and you end up with Terminator 2 and I, Robot. Greenbang shudders to think about it - imagine a future where Edward Furlong or Will Smith are our only hope for saving the world. But give computers a little intelligence and you have Pac Man and a utopia of green energy saving.
Verizon (rhymes with horizon) Wireless is one of the biggest mobile operators in the US and it’s been flashing its energy saving success, thanks to computers that don’t need to be told by their users when to shut off.
Now that’s clever. Hopefully won’t lead to the apocalypse either.
It’s also got a shedload of thin clients - which you’d have thought would be quite tricky for an American company.
Here’s more from Verizon:
Over the past year, Verizon Wireless has deployed 1E WakeUp, which ensures that all PCs, whether on or off, can be patched immediately, and NightWatchman®, which significantly reduces the power consumed by PCs. This power management software is now available on 63,000 managed desktops company-wide, resulting in a 24 percent reduction in both PC power consumption and CO2 emissions. The initiative reduces annual energy costs by $1.3 million and carbon emissions by an estimated 7,700 tons.
In addition, Verizon Wireless has deployed “thin client” solutions – virtual technology that provides users access to centrally-stored programs and software – in 17 of its call centers. Thin clients require less power and generate less heat than full workstations, so the company enjoys the benefits of powering a more compact unit, while also saving on cooling costs. Power consumption test results performed by local power companies for two call centers in Irvine, Calif., and Chandler, Ariz., found energy savings ranged from 50 to 60 percent.
The smaller footprint of thin clients requires fewer manufacturing materials, reducing the environmental impact; thin client life-spans are longer and their failure rate is lower, which reduces replacement purchase and disposal costs.
When Greenbang thinks of the connotations of bottled water, she think of the fake gay suicide pact in cult 80s movie Heathers, where a bottle of the clear stuff is left by a murdered man to mislead the police into believing the victim gay. “This is Ohio,” says the killer. “I mean, if you don’t have a brewski in your hand, you might as well be wearing a dress.”
These days, bottled water doesn’t carry any sexual connotations that Greenbang is aware of (please enlighten her if she’s wrong. No, really, please) but it does carry a fair degree of consumer guilt.
Just the sort of thing that a new eco-labelling action plan from standards body NSF International and food and drink industry consultancy Zenith International hopes to solve. The Carbon Action Plan (CAP) will “extend carbon footprints right up to the shop shelf and will cover a range of sustainability ratings” and force beverage makers to cough up on these metrics:
•
the amount of renewable energy used
• the percentage of recycled material in the packaging
• the number of water litres used to make 1 litre of product
• the extent of a company’s carbon reduction in the previous two years and
• the amount of carbon emissions verified as having been offset.
All those metrics will show up alongside nutritional data on the label. Clever, no?
The bottled water industry will implement the scheme first - Highland Spring have already trialled it - while other pilots are ongoing with soft drinks companies set to be next in line. The scheme will then surface in other food and drink sectors, according to NSF.
Greenbang is out on a press trip in Iceland at the moment. Hitachi has been kind enough to bring a few journos and bloggers (well me) to see a geothermal power plant that fuels some of its data centres.
A bad corporate social responsibility report can be the enterprise equivalent of the push-up bra. To put it bluntly, it looks good from afar, but as soon as you take away the nice packaging, there’s not really an awful lot to look at.
Greenbang mentions this purely because the story she had originally intended to bring you was on the CSR report of a FTSE 100 company which operates in an industry not naturally known for its environmental friendliness. This, thought Greenbang, will be a doozy. An insight into the corporate mind, a fascinating look into what the corporate giant is doing to make its business greener.
What she found was screeds and screeds of nonsense thinner than the nighty on a Playboy bunny. She trawled through heaps and heaps of cobblers of the highest order to find some facts she could use to enlighten you, dear reader. The more she tried, the more she found bugger all.
Note to writers of CSR reports: do it well or don’t bother. You’re just wasting everyone’s time.
Rant over, now onto something that ranks far higher on the usefulness scale: money.
The cash in question takes the form of a new fund from Defra totalling £4 million and open to projects supporting “biomass-fuelled heating and combined heat and power projects, including anaerobic digesters”.
“Applications are welcome from industrial, commercial and community sectors. This encompasses public and private limited companies, from smaller businesses like pubs, clubs, shops or farms, to offices, golf courses, recycling centres, supermarkets and stately homes, right up to larger businesses like breweries, food processing companies and airports. Applicants from the community sector can include schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, local authorities, housing associations and charities,” according to Defra.
Want to get your hands on the cash? There are more details on how to apply here.
One thing we’ve noticed is that companies are very curious as to how they should structure themselves around sustainability.
Some say a new job role is required - the chief sustainability officer.
But others think this person would be made of twigs and look like Wurzel Gummidge (the scarecrow if you’re too young to know, check out the wiki), so prefer to put the chief financial officer in charge of such matters.
We see the need for both. A man in a bowler hat sitting opposite a scarecrow is a nice image to prevent the end of the human race, but really in the short run the CFO is the one who tends to be listened to. That could change, but right now, we think the CFO has more whack…
Anyway - this brings us on to the next point. A survey by Jones Lang LaSalle finds CFOs report sustainability is an increasingly important issue [never ;)] and that a range of financial benefits are achievable for companies that can also cut their impact on the environment.
The survey says:
The greatest barriers to incorporating sustainability into financial strategy include the inability to measure the effects of sustainability on shareholder value (ranked among the top three challenges by 46% of respondents), inability to document the effects on financial performance (37%), and a lack of standard decision-making frameworks that consider environmental factors (36%). The least significant challenge was organization resistance, ranked among the top three barriers by just 20% of respondents.
Quite interesting. But it adds:
More than half of finance executives believe their companies are “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to increase revenue, reduce operating costs, improve investor returns and shareholder value, and improve employee retention through sustainability. The most often cited benefits were reduced risk (”very” or “somewhat” likely to produce benefits at 78% of companies), enhanced brand and reputation (77%), customer retention (72%), and improved employee health and productivity (68%).
The highest priority objectives in corporate sustainability are regulatory compliance (ranked as a high priority for 61% and a mid-level priority for 26% of respondents), improving energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions (a high priority for 47%, mid-level for 32%), and reducing the environmental impact of operations (45% and 32%).
It’s not all about Lego bricks and building you know, that Lego company says.
You try telling that to Greenbang aged three years old - you might get a big chunk of it thrown your way.
If you want to see why Lego considers itself a sustainable company, check out its 2007 report.
It makes good marketing sense - a company that bases everything on plastic toys would need something with lots of nice pictures on it.
But that is what the company says:
“Ever since the founding of the company in 1932, the LEGO Group has considered it important to take part in the improvement of issues that concern the “world” inside the LEGO Group as well as in relation to our stakeholders outside the LEGO Group - being the child and its parents, the retail shops, vendors and the society in general.
”Only the best is good enough” was the motto of Ole Kirk Christiansen, founder of the company and inventor of LEGO bricks, and today we still involve that spirit in every way we operate.
This means that we do our best to make a positive impact on areas such as: human rights, working environment, environment, anti-corruption, charity etc.
Ever since the founding of the company in 1932, the LEGO Group has considered it important to take part in the improvement of issues that concern the “world” inside the LEGO Group as well as in relation to our stakeholders outside the LEGO Group - being the child and its parents, the retail shops, vendors and the society in general.
”Only the best is good enough” was the motto of Ole Kirk Christiansen, founder of the company and inventor of LEGO bricks, and today we still involve that spirit in every way we operate.
“This means that we do our best to make a positive impact on areas such as: human rights, working environment, environment, anti-corruption, charity etc.
It all feels a bit too good for Greenbang. Just call me Mr Cynical.
How often have you wondered if your cheap shirt from a budget clothes store was made by a some underage, underpaid worker in a Chinese sweatshop? Greenbang is guessing if you answered yes, you’re probably not the only one. By a long shot. If you were doing the Family Fortunes ‘we asked one hundred people’ test, Greenbang guesses you’ll get some high nineties. Hey, among Joe Public, the booming Chinese economy might as well be built on blood, sweat, and tears of an exploited workforce, as well as environmental destruction on a scale that makes Amazonian loggers look like they’re not really trying.
But of course, it’s not really the case: Chinese companies now top the world league for privately held businesses adopting corporate social responsibility - or CSR to the uninitiated - policies.
The survey of 34 world economies conducted by consultants Grant Thornton found that 74 percent of all privately owned Chinese businesses have CSR strategies in place, with other developing economies making a strong play. Their findings also say that companies in these developing economies are adopting CSR to win acceptance among Western businesses and consumers.
While Grant Thornton’s research found that ’saving the planet’ was only rated sixth in a list of reasons for these companies adopting CSR practices, environmental activities feature prominently in a list of CSR initiatives they’re undertaking.
Says Patrick Rozario of Grant Thornton:
“Obviously privately held businesses do not have the same stringent CSR regulatory requirements and investor relationship as for public listed companies to consider. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to note that
privately held businesses are adopting CSR policies not just to save the planet but because they are having to in order to survive and prosper.”
If Greenbang suddenly found herself 50 feet tall, she’d probably spend all day crushing cars like they were ants, and peering in the windows of towerblocks. Possibly striding across the English Channel for tea in France when things got a little boring.
However, other giants want to use their powers for good. Take Wal-Mart for example, the biggest retail chain there is out there. Reuters reveals that Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott has been chatting on the subject at a recent conference is going to have a word with its thousands of suppliers in China with a view to asking them to cut their waste and emissions in the factories that are responsible for making Wal-Mart goods.
Reuters also reveals that Wal-Mart is asking its Chinese suppliers to do better on environmentally friendly sourcing and is working with non-government organisations to get plant inspectors on the right track with sustainability.
And that’s not all - says Lee Scott - Chinese suppliers will be asked to cut packaging and be more energy efficient to boot. Scott didn’t give any figures on how much suppliers will have to improve on either, but it has recently asked US suppliers to cut waste by 5 percent by 2013.
The seven dwarves must have a fairly large carbon footprint. For a start, they work in mining, which isn’t exactly well known for environmental credentials and they’re also a decidedly small business.
