Tag Archives: CSR

Winter Olympics 2014: Missed Opportunities to Advance Sustainability | The Guardian

Are the corporate sponsors of the Sochi Winter Olympics missing a big opportunity to advance sustainability globally? Photograph: Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images

Beyond Dow’s commitment to offset the games’ carbon footprint, big sponsors are doing too little to advance sustainability |

The Sochi Winter Olympics, which opens 7 February, was meant to be the greenest Olympics ever. The budget was certainly there: Russia has doled out more than $51bn, an all-time record, to make the event happen.

Yet reports of serious environmental problems have been piling up for months. The UN and World Wildlife Fund have called out Russia over construction practices that damaged the region’s pristine natural ecosystems.

And in October, the Associated Press reported it had found mountains of construction debris in an unlicensed landfill, indicating Russia had broken its promise to make the games zero waste. And, ominously, environmental activists have reported being harassed by officials. It’s a discouraging prelude to the games.

Yet I wondered if there might be a silver lining to be found amid the sustainability commitments made by the game’s corporate sponsors.

After all, while the credibility of the Russian organizers’ on these issues has all but melted away, the corps of 10 worldwide sponsors includes major global brands, many of which have made deep, long-standing commitments to sustainability.

My findings? With one dramatic exception, the games’ deep-pocketed sponsors have done too little to promote sustainability as an element of their efforts at Sochi.

The games’ worldwide sponsors are a familiar lot, including six iconic US brands, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble and Visa; two Asian electronics giants, Japan’s Panasonic and South Korea’s Samsung; and two European companies, France’s Atos and Omega from Switzerland.

This top-tier level of sponsorship, rumored to cost at least $100m per four-year cycle, is far from trivial. And given the International Olympic Committee’s growing emphasis on sustainability – the past two games in London 2012 and Vancouver 2010 are considered the greenest ever – these sponsorships seem an ideal platform in which to mix a high-profile sustainability push.

Yet that doesn’t seem to be happening. For this exercise, I mined online press material and related documentation and emailed each company. Only Dow replied with detailed information. Here’s what I found:

Dow: Sochi’s “official carbon partner”

In a first for the games, chemicals giant Dow has pledged to offset the organizing committee’s entire direct carbon footprint – including greenhouse gas emissions from operating the games’ venues, as well as from travel and lodging for all athletes, staff and volunteers – as well as the estimated travel footprint of all spectators and media attending the Olympic events and the Paralympic Games, scheduled for March.

Dow estimates it will offset emissions equivalent to 360,000 metric tons of carbon-dioxide for the organizing committee, plus 160,000 metric tons for spectators and media. For perspective, the total estimated 520,000 metric tons is equivalent to removing approximately 102,000 cars from US roads, or neutralizing a year’s worth of direct and indirect emissions from 10,800 US homes.

Dow is offsetting these emissions with a mix of completed and ongoing projects, principally in Russia, but also in Brazil and South Korea, which will host the next two Olympics, and other regions. These include farming enhancements, such as low-till farming methods; building efficiency gains via better insulation and other technologies; and industrial upgrades. In the US, Dow is deploying a share of the verified offsets generated from capturing and recycling methane at a waste dump in Georgia.

The broad portfolio of projects, Dow claims, meets international standards and the International Carbon Offset and Reduction Alliance Code of Practice, the global benchmark for offsets. “Dow’s initiative represents a significant step forward in terms of sustainability for one of the world’s main sporting event,” according to a company statement.

GE and turbine power

The only other sponsor with a clear environmental angle to its Olympics pledge is GE. The conglomerate is supplying two very high efficiency “aero-derivative” gas turbines to help power the games. The units, which will provide both base load and peak load power to the Olympics village and venues, feature GE’s latest emissions technology.

Evolved from airplane jet engines, the model is designed to ramp up and down in less than 10 minutes, which makes it well suited to pair with the variable output of wind turbines, solar panels and other renewable energy systems.

That’s not to say that renewable energy will be powering Sochi. Despite early estimates of promising potential for geothermal, solar, hydro and wind and some building-level projects, there is scant evidence that any substantial new renewables capacity has been built.

Everyone else

From there, evidence of sustainability efforts by other corporate sponsors tapers off sharply. For their part, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, both long-time Olympic sponsors, have focused on health – but details are scant. Coca-Cola Russia said it plans to launch a traveling showcase of activities promoting an active, healthy lifestyle during the Winter Olympics.

A survey of news and press materials of the remaining half dozen top-tier sponsors (Atos, Omega, Panasonic, P&G, Samsung, and Visa) turned up no explicit sustainability goals in their Sochi commitments.

To be sure, I hope there are other sustainability efforts afoot that I missed. I welcome information on other programs in the comments below.

Big platform, big responsibility

But the overall direction of the Sochi games is discouraging. It’s a pity that more companies aren’t using the Olympics to up their sustainability efforts, not least because the event offers such far-reaching visibility.

As the Natural Resource Defense Council’s eco-sports guru Allen Herskowitz says, only about a tenth of the public follow sciences, but nearly two-thirds follow sports. This means that sustainability actions in sporting arenas have supersized potential to normalize greener practices.

And, lest we forget, lurking beneath the immediate question of sustainability is a deeper worry about climate change, particularly as it impacts the viability of future winter sports.

In winter playgrounds around the world, climate change is already degrading the seasonal conditions that skiers, boarders and others depend on. In Vancouver 2010, unseasonably warm weather forced the games to resort to extreme measures, such as hauling in stored snow.

Sochi 2014 also has been stashing snow, and is ready to deploy an army of energy-intensive earth-movers and snow-making systems to make ready for the games. It’s good to know Sochi is prepared for a potential shortage of the white stuff.

Still, it would be better to know the games and their partners are working today to avoid climate troubles and warmer winters tomorrow.

Policing Toy Factories to Avoid Worker Harm: International Council of Toy Industries | Corporate Knights

Mortally dangerous conditions remain a grim reality for workers at factories around the world.

In September 2012, some 300 workers died in a garment factory fire in Pakistan, many because they were trapped behind locked emergency exits. Six months later, another 1,100 seamstresses were crushed to death when an eight-storey building collapsed in Bangladesh, despite warnings it was unsafe.

As the multi-trillion-dollar textile industry struggled to respond to these tragedies, the much smaller global toy industry was able to call on a resource no other consumer product industry can match.In short order, big toy brands and retail members of the International Council of Toy Industries (ICTI) were able to tap into a one-of-a-kind database they have built over the past decade known as the ICTI CARE (Caring, Awareness, Responsible, Ethical) Process (ICP).

The trove of data, which includes wage rates, hours worked, worker age and 200 or so other metrics at thousands of toy factories, allowed big toy buyers to rapidly identify manufacturers located in the areas affected by the recent labour disasters for focused follow-up. Within weeks, industry executives started to develop and roll out tougher rules to all of the factories in the ICP network, guiding inspectors to enforce stricter requirements for fire escapes and building integrity.

The quick response was made possible by a combination of ICP’s carefully cultivated industry collaboration together with a recent decision to port its unique database onto a web-based platform provided by Enablon, a supply-chain software service provider founded in 2000.

“Not long ago, this sort of information was considered proprietary. A single factory might have two dozen clients, but they didn’t want to talk to one another, for fear of competitive disclosure” says Philippe Tesler, co-founder and CEO of Enablon North America.

A combination of factors has rewritten these habits. There’s a growing recognition that risks can be lowered and costs minimized through collaboration. “Reporting has gone from a defensive response to a more proactive process,” says Tesler.

Back in 2002, the toy industry was facing a series of relatively small-scale labour mishaps at overseas factories. “Pressure was building from retailers, from consumers, NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and investors to boost regulation,” recalls Christian Ewert, president and CEO of the ICTI CARE Foundation, which oversees the supply chain program.

Instead, the industry group pushed for self-regulation and established the ICP, a framework in which toymakers would share and compare information towards the end of “ensuring safe and humane workplace environments for toy factory workers worldwide,” says Ewert.

Notably, the ICP was established as a standalone not-for-profit, overseen by a board that includes NGO and civil-sector experts, and on which active toy industry executives are in a minority.

Streamlining inspection efforts has been a central priority from the beginning. When Ewert started in the toy industry in the 1990s, he worked with a manufacturer that faced 64 audits per year, each asking for similar information. “I’d much rather have seen those auditors inspecting 64 different factories, rather than the same factory 64 times,” he says.

The move to Enablon’s platform has helped transform this process from a cumbersome paper chase into a more scalable, easier to use and fast-evolving technology. On a factory floor in China, auditors and factories can input data wirelessly. On the other side of the planet, ICP members can log in and tweak standards on the fly, and do deep data analysis across the factories they are working with.

Today, the system tracks data on roughly 2,500 factories that employ some one million workers. Most are based in China, home to a vast majority of the world’s toymakers. Just 1,600 factories are currently certified as meeting ICP’s criteria. New factories join each year, but year to year about 13 per cent lose their approved status.

The most frequent causes for such a loss? A lack of transparency about whether workers are paid correctly or companies are demanding too many hours of work, says Ewert. Picking up such malpractice early can nip bigger problems in the bud, lowering the risk to corporate reputation.

“Companies don’t want to be named and shamed,” says David Metcalfe, CEO of Verdantix, an independent analyst firm focused on energy, environment and sustainability issues.

Over time, Metcalfe adds, the best employee health and safety plans can evolve to do more than protect workers. They can also proactively improve supply chain operations by identifying potential trouble spots, focusing corrective responses and avoiding the cost and hassle of switching factories following a crisis.

ICP, for example, goes beyond simply tracking auditors’ reports. It reaches out to workers directly. Factories are required to post a hotline to which workers can anonymously phone in problems. The organization receives up to 350 such calls per month. When the software detects a spike in calls from a given factory, ICTI CARE can increase its training efforts with both staff and management, before a crisis breaks.

And if early action doesn’t work, the threat of being de-certified is a potent motivator, says Ewert. After all, it’s not a single buyer pulling out, but the entire ICP network. Ewert is confident the transparency will continue to grow as technology advances.

“Workers can call us today,” he says. “In time, they’ll be able to send pictures of dangerous conditions too,” as smart phones emerge as another tool to help the industry identify and repair risks before they become tragedies.

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Can a new architecture revive the UN Global Compact? | The Guardian

As business enthusiasm wanes, the UN Global Compact unveils new investment opportunities. Will it be enough to attract more participation?

UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, shown here at the UN headquarters, today urged companies to coordinate their market efforts with UN’s developing goals. Photograph: Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

In collaboration with some 1,000 business allies, the UN today issued an updated “architecture” aimed at intensifying companies’ role in advancing economic development, improving human health and reversing environmental degradation.

At the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit in New York City, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon emphasized the growing need for private companies to coordinate their market efforts with UN’s long-standing development goals.

The business engagement architecture is designed to “drive and scale up corporate actions to directly advance United Nations goals,” Ban said.

The blueprint, Building the Post-2015 Business Engagement Architecture, marks a high point in the UN’s ambitions to engage with business. When it was launched in 2000, Ban said, “there was no clear agenda for business”.

Today, the GC is the world’s largest voluntary organization of its kind, comprising 8,000 companies and 4,000 civil society organizations from 145 countries.

“For the first time in the history of United Nations, UN goals, sustainability development priorities, are directly linked to long term corporate goals,” said Georg Kell, executive director of the Global Compact. “This is a genuine innovation and brings a strategic level of collaboration to the effort. We offer, for the first time, a comprehensive and integrated menu of opportunities for engagement.”

The architecture that the UN released today, in collaboration with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the Global Reporting Initiative, formalizes three broad new programmes focused on education, agriculture and peace.

The new Business for Peace platform, for instance, aims to help companies invest in conflict-affected and high-risk areas. Long-term job creation, economic growth and infrastructure restoration are vital to nurturing peace in often-fragile conditions of post-conflict regions, said Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, vice chair of the UN Global Compact board.

These three new programmes join an existing pool of efforts focused on women’s empowerment, children’s rights, climate, water and anti-corruption.

Re-firing commitment

The new plan – 13 years after the GC’s founding – comes as the clock runs down toward the 2015 deadline to achieve the Millennium Goals.

Enthusiasm seems to be ebbing. A CEO survey released by Accenture during the conference found that most companies aren’t integrating social, environmental and governance issues into their core strategies. (Download a copy of the report here or get more information from Accenture here.)

The poll of more than 1,000 global executives found that 45% of CEOs believe that sustainability will be “very important” to the future success of their business, a decline of nine percentage points from a similar study in 2010.

As GSB’s Jo Confino pointed out in his assessment of this study, these findings bookend a pair of two earlier studies (from the UNGC and CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), that find progress slowing – or even backsliding – in corporate efforts.

US players missing

North American companies, which make up roughly a third of Fortune’s list of the 500 largest global companies, comprise only 18% of Accenture’s respondents.

With their high visibility and deep resources, more US players would help. Yet US companies have been somewhat hamstrung by concerns over legal liability if they commit to the compact’s 10 principles.

The UNGC is working to help legal counsels separate and neutralize these perceived risks from conventional contractual liabilities and open the door for more US entrants, Kell told me in a Q&A following the launch.

“We want to grow from 8,000 to 20,000 hopefully by 2016, but we can grow only with quality,” said Kell, who last year took steps to prod and shed inactive GC members.

Finding the right balance – and meeting the goals – is critical, said John Ruggie, Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, during the launch:

Look around you and you will already see signs of some of the consequences. They take the form of resource nationalism, increased protectionism, sectarian violence, extreme populism on the left and right, xenophobia, homophobia and generally rolling back globalization out of fear of the other and by anger at fear of being left behind. That would not auger well for people planet or profits…. The stakes are high, the time is short, the cost of getting it wrong is incalculable and the opportunities to getting it right are legion.

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See the original article here:
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/un-global-compact-architecture

Responsible investment has a vital role in securing peace post-conflict | The Guardian

A new UN initiative aims to help spur recovery in post-conflict regions by guiding companies to invest responsibly

A Syrian family at a camp on the Turkish border. Even when wars are over, they often leave a pool of underemployed youth and a time-bomb of social unrest. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

War and peace are linked inextricably by economic development. Often, even when the shooting stops, long-term peace is impossible without economic development. Yet investment will not flow where conflict lingers.

This grim Catch-22 has resurfaced lately with the unfolding catastrophe in Syria. Day by day, the death toll, physical destruction, and refugee displacements mount. The disaster is creating countless long term, chronic woes too. The destruction of 3,600 schools, for instance, in Syria has swelled by two million or so the global tally of young people forced out of school by armed conflict to some 50 million overall.

In Syria and elsewhere this creates a pool of underemployed youth, and a potential time bomb of social unrest.

Once conflict ends, if there are no jobs for young people, rebels and soldiers, “The guns will come back out… In the absence of economic development, peace is difficult to achieve, and harder to maintain,” Sir Mark Moody-Stuart told me. From his tenure as Chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Moody-Stuart is familiar with the challenges, and opportunities, facing investment in conflict-afflicted regions.

Data on the economic toll of the loss of peace is difficult to come by, but an analysis by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), estimated that had the world been completely peaceful in 2011, global GDP would have been roughly $9tn higher — almost equal to the German and Japanese economies combined.

These days, as vice-chair of the board of the UN Global Compact, Moody-Stuart is working to get the private sector to reconsider these opportunities. “Not so very long ago, divestment from troubled areas was the goal,” he said.

Today, however, former critics are increasingly willing to “sit down with investors and senior management to engage constructively and work together on strategies that both develop business and contribute to peace and development,” he said.

I met with Moody-Stuart in New York at a midtown hotel where he was unveiling a new UN effort to help guide private-sector investment into regions where they can help peace was taking root. The platform, Business for Peace (B4P), will be formally launched today by the UN secretary-general at the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit. B4P builds on a decade’s worth of earlier efforts that are documented in areport, Responsible Business Advancing Peace, also released today.

The cases documented therein — and discussed at today’s meeting — are a reminder that the path peace via development is a highly local challenge, where solutions vary by context.

Peaceful cheese, fewer guns

Cheese is the focus of a long-running effort in the Caucasus. Starting a decade ago, cheese makers from regions spanning Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey came together under a single brand that has developed strong export sales.

The shared interests prevented the alliance from collapsing during the Russia-Georgia war of 2008. “It was one only regional alliances to survive,” said Diana Klein, conflict advisor at International Alert. Peace and development have their own momentum, she added, “If it’s working, it’s much harder for a single participant to act out.”

Some efforts can run counter to conventional wisdom. In the Philippines’ a subsidiary of Swiss cement giant Holcim set up a plant north of Manila where communist rebel group was active.

In 2005, the group attacked the facility, taking weapons from guards and causing $120,000 of damage. Rather than boost its guards’ firepower, Holcim took a slower, more complex path, meeting with community members to learn more why its plant — a large local employer — was targeted.

Their surprising findings? The guards’ firearms were part of the target. Rather than meet threat with force, Holcim opted for un-armed guards, a change which required careful community education.

“They had to convince their own staff they were safe, to convince the community that the guards are truly not armed,” said Sir Moody-Stuart, otherwise the guerillas may come back. Since this “social fencing” approach began, not a single incident involving firearms has happened.

A marathon effort

Building companies and attracting investors in the wake of conflict is a “very, very hard challenge,” said Klein of Conflict Advisors. “It requires a marathon mentality.” These investment efforts are reaching into some of the most challenging conflicts in recent memory.

In Sudan, still recovering from genocide in Darfur and the subsequent bifurcation of the nation, a team of B4P-affiliated investors with stakes in Sudanese oil services companies find their most difficult issue — company affiliation with human rights violations — impossible to resolve.

But while some strata of the market remain opaque, others are opening. Bit-by-bit the economy is coming back to life. Telecoms provider Sudatel, partially government owned, has emerged as the young country’s first multinational, operating in five neighboring countries. With 60% of Sudan’s population under 20 years of age, the company is focusing on serving young consumers. “To live together, people need to communicate,” said Ehab Osman, Sudatel’s CEO.

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See the original article here: 
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/responsible-investment-role-peace-post-conflict

Can new supply chain approaches prevent another Rana Plaza? | The Guardian

Tougher factory and supply chain standards won’t be enough to prevent disasters like the Bangladesh factory collapse. Can development tactics succeed where conventional approaches have failed?

Foxconn factory workers in China's Guangdong province

Foxconn workers in a Chinese factory. Can new industry tactics prevent supply chain disasters? Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters

Ideally, tragedy begets reform.

That’s the tale we’ve learned from past industrial disasters, including the 1911 inferno at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in Manhattan, which killed 146 and marked the dawn of a fundamental shift in US workplace standards.

The changes took decades, to be sure, but the tragedy spurred the development of fire and building regulations, the creation of labor and women’s unions and a culture of real regulatory enforcement.

What, then, do we to make of reactions to the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory six months ago?

The deaths of some 1,130 garment workers in the Dhaka, Bangladesh, sweatshops drew a storm of public outcry. But in supply-chain circles, the tragedy has revealed more about the limits of our potential to “fix” global supply chains that, in some cases, have grown too big and too complex to avoid human-rights failures.

Facing this reality, a new generation of supply-chain experiments are borrowing tactics from conventional development efforts. These look beyond conventional rules- and business-transaction based approaches to address the root causes of many factory malpractices. In general, they’re working to improve education, health and community conditions in ways that benefit both workers and their employers.

Initial Rana reaction

When Rana Plaza collapsed, the response – among top-tier corporate brands – was rapid. Within a month, a cadre of mostly European fashionchains, including H&M, Zara, C&A, Tesco and Primark, signed a legally binding agreement to help fund and enforce safety improvements in Bangladeshi factories.

US and Canadian retailers took a different path.

Under the umbrella of the National Retail Federation (NRF), key brands backed an alternate agreement reaffirming ongoing efforts to take a ground-up approach, training workers, factory owners, officials and foreign brands in parallel.

The split response led to an unseemly tit-for-tat round of criticism.

The heads of IndustriALL, a global union supporting the European effort, called the rival plan a “pale imitation.” The NRF effort also drew criticism for not requiring its suppliers to allow workers to organize.

The head of the NRF volleyed back, in The Wall Street Journal: “The IndustriALL plan seeks major funding by private business without providing accountability for how funds are spent, as well as binding retailers to specific resourcing requirements without taking into account the impracticality of such a requirement.”

Distracting as it is, the infighting reveals the spectrum of current possibilities – from the EU’s conventional approach to NRF’s ground-up agenda – and many of the limits that circumscribe supply chain efforts circa 2013.

Limits of good intentions

However earnest, corporate efforts to improve supply chain operations have not kept pace with the compounding complexity of globalized supply chains. Links have grown too numerous; buyers’ influence dissipates too rapidly.

Eric Olson, BSR’s senior vice president, walked me through the vexing math facing would-be supply-chain trackers. A typical Fortune 500 company will have hundreds or thousands of first-tier suppliers. But supply chains can easily extend to 15 layers or more.

“There’s almost no company on the planet that has figured out how to cascade their supply chain efforts into the second tier,” Olson said, “let alone the third, fourth and so on, even though 80% of the impacts are happening further out in the chain.”

Meanwhile, a recent survey of some 1,700 UN Global Compact corporate members highlights another limitation. While most companies set goals for their suppliers, only 18% actually help their suppliers set and review goals their own goals – and only 9% take steps to verify the efforts, according to Global Corporate Sustainability Report 2013.

“While companies are making progress in terms of thinking about supplier sustainability and setting expectations, the supporting actions that will drive adherence have shown little or no increase over the past few years,” according to the report.

Wider scope, deeper reach

If conventional supply chain practices are running up against inherent limits, what next?

In some of the world’s least-developed markets, a new generation of more holistic experiments is showing promise.

These experiments stem from the recognition that mandating standards to a factory manager often ignores developing-world realities, such as poorly educated workers, degraded public health, economic insecurity and antagonistic worker-manager dynamics.

If these factors can be improved, the potential to advance more ethical, productive factory ecosystems would rise overall.

As an example, Olson points to HERProject. The program, acollaboration between BSR and 22 multinational companies, is delivering curricula focused on health and financial topics to some 200,000 women workers in 200 factories and farms in Asia and Africa.

Early findings show that when offered to women through their workplaces, the factories benefit via reduced absenteeism and turnover. Greater work-place trust, in turn, is helping managers collaborate with workers on setting conditions. A Levi Strauss & Co. supplier in Egypt reported a four-fold return from the program

There’s no denying this approach is more difficult. Yet it’s clear that, if supply networks continue to stretch and globalize, conventional supply-chain tactics are ill-suited to less developed markets.

If high street brands can cultivate common cause with development goals, a smarter approach to supply chain management will be a welcome byproduct.

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Profiting from sustainability: 5 tips for corporate boards | The Guardian

Whether you call them directors, supervisors or governors, companies’ top overseers must get involved in sustainability. Here’s how

Of all the challenges facing corporate sustainability leaders, a lack of board-level support can be one of the most frustrating. While a chief executive’s top priority is day-to-day operations, directors’ main job is to think big, look out for long-term material risks to shareholder interest and advise on strategic opportunities. By these standards, sustainability should be a natural fit for most directors.

In practice, though, boards have engaged less with sustainability than many CEOs or shareholders would like. A study by EY (formerly Ernst & Young) that looked at all shareholder proxy initiatives found that the largest share, 45%, dealt with environment and social issues – and, in the past five years, shareholders voted to support these initiatives at steadily higher rates.

“Investors see sustainability questions as highly material to company strategy,” says Aron Cramer, CEO of BSR. “Whether it’s the decision to enter frontier markets like Myanmar or how best to operate in a climate-constrained world, these factors materially effect whether a business thrives or not. These are exactly the kind of things boards should be thinking about.”

Sustainability-minded CEOs are looking for some help from their boards, too. A 2010 poll of CEOs conducted by the UN Global Compact concluded that 93% of chief executives wanted their board members to discuss and act on environmental, social and governance issues. Yet that same year, only 75% of CEO respondents reported that their company directors took an active role in “considering and acting on sustainability”.

If both investors and CEOs are pushing for boards to get smarter about sustainability, it’s curious that progress has been so slow. The culprits, Cramer says, are corporate convention and a lack of education. Directors are typically drawn from financial, legal and management backgrounds; thus very few have formal sustainability training.

The UN Global Compact – the world’s largest corporate citizenship and sustainability initiative – hopes to tackle this sustainability-IQ deficit with its LEAD Board Programme, which it’s getting ready to trial this fall. So far, five companies have agreed to trial the [program, which will consist of two half-day sessions delivered by an expert mediator: power and gas utility Enel and petroleum producer Eni (both of Italy); power and gas utility Eskom (of South Africa); chemicals maker Yara (of Norway); and cellular company SK Telekom (of South Korea).

Five best practices for boards

The UNGC has been developing the program since January of 2011, consulting with Cramer and a dozen or so other global sustainability leaders. Some of the top practices the program will emphasize include:

* Define the business case for sustainability. Boards should help define how and why sustainability can benefit shareholder interest by boosting sales, cutting costs and/or enhancing profits. Once directors map out the issues that are most material to the company, they can single out top priorities, which in turn can help the chief executive lead the mission – and get buy-in from employees and business partners.

* Establish or approve targets. Just as they do for sales, market share growth, and other key indicators, boards should help establish or approve sustainability targets – both in the short- and long-term – for their companies’ sustainability performance and include them in the business strategy. A wide range of metrics is available, from mature standards such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index to more industry-specific measures, or early-stage metrics can be developed in house.

* Set clear standards for performance and recruitment. Boards should align annual performance reviews of incumbent executives with criteria that make sustainability a priority, just as they do with stock price, sales growth and other conventional performance indicators. When hunting for a new executive, boards should include sustainability in the search criteria. Candidates should be able to demonstrate clear understanding of – and a commitment to – their industry’s best sustainability practices.

* Link remuneration to long-term goals. Executive bonuses have long been linked to short-term financial targets. Given that sustainability stabilizes growth over the long term, but must be implemented in the near term, it follows that CEOs should be rewarded along both timelines. For example, progress toward long-term interests can be rewarded by linking part of pay to stocks, bonds or reserve payments released a decade or so in the future. For near-term rewards, boards can link a share of CEO’s regular cash compensation to the achievement of year-to-year sustainability objectives.

* Take responsibility for implementation and communication. Communicating sustainability achievements to shareholders is also vital, whether in a separate sustainability report or integrated into the financial reporting. Directors should also formally sign off on the company’s sustainability report. Although this is not legally necessary in most jurisdictions, director signatures send a high-profile confirmation to stakeholders that sustainability and transparency are company priorities.

Required reading

If all goes according to plan, the curriculum will be tweaked according to feedback from the pilot companies and then rolled out to all comers in 2014.

In time, these voluntary lessons may become required reading in some markets, Cramer notes. South Africa was the first country to mandate an integrated reporting standard, including sustainability metrics, for listed companies. Trading exchanges in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Sao Paolo are moving in a similar direction, he says.

As the sustainability reporting standards spread, more corporate directors will want to get up to speed, before they’re obliged to do so.

To learn more about the nuts and bolts of the curriculum, start here: LEAD Board Programme. Deeper details aren’t yet available, but will surface in coming months.

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Check out the original article here:
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/un-global-compact-leaders-summit-leadership

Sports sustainability gurus share their all-star plays | GreenBiz

Back in 2008, when the US Tennis Association launched an ambitious effort to lower the environmental impact of its mammoth US Open event, it turned out to be nearly impossible to find a vendor to supply enough recycled paper napkins, greener plates, cups and flatware. Niche suppliers existed, to be sure, but few were big enough to handle the two-week long event’s 700,000 guests.

In the world of greener sports events, those take-what-you-can-get early days are long gone. At the Green Sports Alliance’s third annual summit in Brooklyn this week, visitors could sample a dizzying array of recycled, recyclable, carbon neutral or compostable alternatives from vendors on hand, including bamboo plates, plant starch utensils, sugar-cane clamshells and even bioplastic sushi containers.

Tennis ball recycling at the US Open (Credit: US Open)

After holding its previous two summits in the green-friendly Pacific Northwest, the GSA shifted its summit to New York City this year.

“This is where the big leagues are,” Darby Hoover, NRDC senior resource specialist, told me. She meant that literally. The four largest pro leagues are headquartered within a few blocks of each other in midtown Manhattan: Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Football League (NFL) and the National Hockey League (NHL).

From 11 teams and venues in 2011, when it debuted nationally, the alliance now boasts 180 from 16 pro and college leagues, along with concert-promoter and venue-giant AEG.“Competition absolutely raises the bar,” said Bob Nutting, Pittsburgh Pirates‘ chairman of the board. “There are a lot of competitive personalities in sports. Say you’re No. 3 in [recycling] diversion rates in the Major League. You can be sure we want to move to No. 2 or No. 1.”

The growing cadre of green-focused teams means that it’s rare these days to run into shortages of eco-supplies or services. Venue-focused efforts are de rigueur. Building LEED certified facilities, deploying aggressive recycling and food waste composting, installing low water bathrooms and high-efficiency lighting retrofits, along with renewable energy commitments and on-site installations, have all become standard operating procedure.

Job done? Hardly. That’s the easy stuff. It saves money by cutting waste, energy and resource use, said a senior sustainability executive who oversees scores of sporting venues and asked not to be named. But deep skepticism persists. There’s still an assumption that these are costly steps, although the industry has overcome the assumption that such options are impossible.

That’s mirrored in the share of teams that haven’t yet come on board. In baseball, for instance, 17 of 30 teams are GSA members. Just 12 of 32 NFL teams and a mere seven of 32 NBA teams are on board. Penetration into college level sports remains even thinner.

Click for full image (Credit: EPA)

To help the eco-laggards get with the game, here are seven tips from team owners and sustainability gurus.

Play the long game. “Everyone loves sustainability when it goes perfectly,” said Nutting. “In Pittsburgh, when I took over the team, it was in a losing cycle. So I got some unpleasant letters saying that we were valuing green priorities more than on-field experience.” The team fixed that in two ways. First, by winning: the Pirates are neck-and-neck with the St. Louis Cardinals to win their first divisional title in 21 years. And second, “by sticking to the priority through thick and thin.”

Moderate the message. Now in its sixth year of promoting green programs, the USTA is finding that less messaging can be more effective. “In the first year, we used the PA system with constant announcements and signage everywhere to remind visitors to recycle,” said Lauren Kittelstad Tracy, USTA’s senior manager of strategic initiatives. A survey revealed that it was too much. “Our guests know that recycling is important,” she said. “It’s more important to make it easy for them to do so than to remind them to do it.”

Tap into “jewel” events. Playoffs, championships and all-star games are emerging as high-visibility stages that leagues can use to extend the visibility of their green efforts into communities, the media and other franchises. Baseball has made its All-Star Games a prime focus for these efforts in recent years. At the 2013 game, the MLB deployed green teams to roam up and down the stadium, like vendors, to collect cups, cans and plastic. The effort helped achieve record rates of waste diverted from land fills, said Paul Hanlon, director of facility operations, MLB. To cut food waste, the event pushed beyond composting, by donating unsold foods to a charity.

Localize efforts, geographically and digitally. Asked if a fear of offending conservative voters might slow green initiatives in conservative areas, panels agreed hesitatingly. If we put those messages [about carbon reduction] on Chevy’s Facebook [page], we get a ton of negative messages from deniers,” said David Tulauskas, director of sustainability at General Motors, which sponsors IndyCar driver Simona de Silvestro. “On Twitter, there’s not so much of a problem, though.” Meanwhile, at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) racetrack near Austin, Tex., Formula One and other race events must be conducted under strict carbon emission and other eco rules set out as city law, explained Edgar Farrera, COTA’s director of sustainability.

Solar panel installation at St. Louis Cardinals’ Busch Stadium (Credit: Microgrid Solar)

Do more with sponsorship. Progress is slow in linking sponsorships to sustainability goals, said Justin Zeulner, senior director of sustainability and public affairs for the Portland Trail Blazers. Globally, some $14 billion in sponsorship funding is poured into sports deals, ranging from players’ shoe contracts to venue-naming rights. Yet while venues are working hard to green their operations, the link with sponsors is weak at best. There’s a disconnect between the strategic decision to sponsor a venue which is made at a very high level, GM’s Tulauskas explained, based on a given market age, gender mix, ethnicity, geography and other demographic factors. But the sustainability messaging happens locally, only once the agreement has been set, he added.

Put an (athlete’s) face on green goals. As yet, there is no Michael Jordan of sports sustainability. This is a problem, said Greg Busch, executive vice president of GMR Marketing, an event promotional agency, because as successful as any team may be in pushing greener practices, a celebrity athlete can reach a broader audience. “The athletes give you a face and a voice. That allows you to really communicate with kids, moms, fans in general,” he explained. Athletes remain apprehensive because green is such a broad platform, unlike many products or charities they commonly back.

Resources. As part of the event, the EPA announced its Green Sports Resource Directory, thick with advice on greening efforts, as well as a scorecard of leading efforts. NRDC debuted a guide focused on college efforts. The report, “Collegiate Game Changer,” complements the NRDC’s reference work for pro teams, “Game Changer,” published in November.

Image of astroturf by narokzaad via Shutterstock. Photo of solar panels atop the St. Louis Cardinals’ Busch Stadium via Microgrid Solar.

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Check out the original story at:
http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/08/29/pro-sports-sustainability-gurus-share-their-all-star-plays

Are bottom-up sustainability initiatives filling gap left by Rio+20? | The Guardian

Small, grassroots sustainability efforts have proliferated since Rio+20, but a status report signals some challenges and limitations

A woman carries freshly formed earthen lamps for drying outside her home in Mumbai, India.

In the absence of a meaningful global agreement at the Rio+20 Earth summit last summer, expectations collapsed – but didn’t disappear. They shifted from big to small, from global to local.

In response, sustainability leaders recalibrated their attention to the potential for local and regional initiatives to fill this leadership vacuum. After all, while climate change remains an immutably global problem, many of the most immediate environmental and developmental challenges – toxic pollution, education and public health and water and land degradation, to name a few – must be dealt with at a local or regional level.

A year or so on, the question remains: is this bottom-up, smaller-scale approach working? With more than 1,000 sustainability leaders from businesses, NGOs and their allies set to converge in New York next month for a leaders’ summit of the UN’s Global Compact – the world’s largest corporate sustainability membership organisation – it’s a good time to take stock.

It’s premature to come to any sweeping conclusions, to be sure. Too little time has passed to expect even the best executed of the blizzard of plans to have achieved major gains. Yet a recent special report, surveying the portfolio of UN bottoms-up initiatives, makes for decidedly mixed reading.

Grand scale

On one hand, the tally of efforts – totalling 1,382 – offers impressive quantitative evidence of a wide and deep groundswell of initiatives across the globe. On the other hand, the survey shows a worrying fuzziness and lack of progress in key areas.

Though still faint, these signals beg critical questions. Is it possible to distribute a clear sense of direction across thousands of initiatives? Has progress been stymied by the lack an over-arching development goal?

For a sense of the scope and scale of the proliferation of initiatives following Rio+20, flip through the July 2013 special report, Sustainable Development in Action, prepared by the United Nations’ sustainable development division. Synthesizing listings across a handful of databases, the report surveys the accretion of voluntary initiatives that support the goals of Rio+20.

The sheer scale of efforts is encouraging. Out of the 1,382 efforts, more than 700 commitments were announced as part of Rio+20. UN programmes have seeded hundreds more in recent years, including Sustainable Energy for All, United Nations Global Compact, Every Woman Every Child and others.

A closer look

Read a bit more closely, though, and fractures appear. Take, for example, one of the eight high-priority areas examined by the special report, higher education sustainability initiatives (HESI), While 272 organisations in 47 countries had made commitments related to higher-education sustainability as of June, a lack of centralised coordination is impeding progress (emphasis added):

Since HESI was established as an ad hoc initiative by several UN organizations and external stakeholders, this action network relies on a more informal organizational structure, typical of a network of stakeholders rather than a top-bottom organization. Therefore, although the organizational capacity to implement the network goals is rather limited and thus a bit challenging, it can also be seen as strength. (p. 20)

Improved energy efficiency and renewables are widely supported. Yet under the “Sustainable energy for all” category, the special report finds that scaling remains a barrier:

Ensuring adequate support to facilitate action across the many partner countries and thematically driven high impact opportunities, while at the same time collaborating with thousands of stakeholders over the course of the next 17 years, remain a key challenge for the initiative. Without proper follow-up and engagement, many commitment makers may not be fully engaged, which means that they would be left with little direction on how to contribute to the initiative in a tangible way. (p. 26)

To be fair, the problems highlighted in the special report extend far beyond the business-focused mandate of the Global Compact. However, the fuzzy goals and lack of guidance that UN programs face mirror some of the obstacles dogging private sustainability efforts as well.

The sheer number of different sustainability initiatives is a rising source of confusion for individuals, companies, consortia and even entire sectors. Even the most pro-sustainability business leaders can find themselves overwhelmed by well-intentioned, often overlapping agendas, collaborations and standards. The Global Initiative for Sustainability Ratings has uncovered more than 1,500 sustainability indicators spanning almost 600 issues.

And small, uncoordinated efforts come with added costs and missed opportunities. In a recent conversation with GSB’s Jo Confino, Mars Inc. CSO Barry Parkin estimated that 125 cocoa sustainability programs exist, each with high startup costs and affecting hundreds – at most, thousands – of farmers. “If we were to align behind programmes, it would be much more efficient,” he said, “and we could really scale up our impacts.”

Signs of success

That said, there are certainly some promising signs, too. Cities of varying sizes, with varying resources, are proving that a common set of interests, abilities and incentives can yield real gains.

Some 4,700 projects have been registered with C40 Cities, which links the mitigation efforts of scores of megacities together with many smaller innovative burgs. The group is on track to cut more than 1bn tonnes of emissions by 2030. In another city-focused program, the carbonn Climate Cities Registry, 302 cities from 42 countries, together responsible for some 1.5 gigatonnes of carbon-dioxide annually, have filed more than 3,600 commitments, inventories or mitigation plans.

What’s behind these metro-successful stories? Municipal climate efforts can yield self-sustaining benefits, such as boosting energy savings, health and the economy, according to a 2013 survey of 110 cities conducted by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), C40 and the sustainability-engineering firm AECOM.

The gains are especially encouraging given that cities are the battleground for a growing share of the climate challenge. Urban centres account for a bit more than half of the world’s population today, but generate 75% of the globe’s greenhouse-gas emissions – and they’re expected to grow to contain 70% of the population by 2050.

What’s next?

Whether they take the form of rules requiring big buildings to track and publicize their resource use or water-savings standards on plumbing fixtures, successful city-scale efforts share some attributes: they benefit stakeholders, they’re clearly defined – with timelines – and are pushed from the top down.

When sustainability leaders meet in New York next month, they should realize they have a rare opportunity to give helpful structure and greater urgency to business’s role in the post-2015 world. Without clearer marching orders and deeper institutional support, though, the risk is that the post Rio+20 bottom-up approach will simply bottom out.

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Check out the original story here:
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/post-2015-bottom-up-approach

Meet the Change Makers: AEG Turns Up the Volume on Sustainability | OnEarth

You may not know AEG Worldwide, but odds are good that you’ve spent an evening in one of the company’s many venues, rooting for the home team or lip-syncing a favorite song. AEG operates and often owns some of the world’s largest stadiums, concert halls, and other entertainment sites, including L.A.’s Staples Center and the newBarclays Center in Brooklyn, where the Nets will soon relocate. The company’s portfolio also includes London’s O2 Arena, a hub for the 2012 Olympic Games. Off the field, there’s no bigger player in sports than AEG — which made the company a natural target for environmental advocates seeking a high-profile partner in efforts to “green” pro sports.

Worldwide, the sports and entertainment industry’s environmental impact is huge. Yet it has historically been made up mostly of small-scale players — each running just a handful of venues — so the shift toward environmentally friendly practices has happened more slowly than in other sectors, which could be influenced by just one or two big companies going green. Back in 2007, AEG’s footprint included just seven venues. Since then, backed by billionaire-owner Philip Anschutz, CEO Tim Leiweke has rapidly expanded the scale and diversity of the company’s activities. Today AEG manages and/or services more than 110 venues on five continents and owns a share of 10 pro teams that play in its arenas, including the NBA’s fabled Lakers. And the company ranks as the second-largest event promoter in the United States., backing events such as the massive Coachella music festival.

Given AEG’s size, its global sustainability director, Jennifer Regan, has unprecedented influence over the greening of the sports and entertainment industry. Regan joined the company fresh out of college in 2007 and has risen to become its senior-most executive focused on green issues. Her team started out looking at energy use at a small number of the company’s sites but has steadily expanded its focus to include more venues and more complex measures of consumption. In 2010, AEG published the industry’s first sustainability report and debuted a green strategy known as AEG 1Earth. An update is due by year-end.OnEarth contributor Adam Aston recently caught up with Regan following her visit to the White House for a ceremony celebrating the greening of professional sports.

Twenty-six is young to be leading the green efforts at a major company. How did you get there?

I had the perfect mix of entertainment and environmental background, but the decision to really dedicate myself to corporate sustainability took shape before my junior year. I spent that summer in Senegal at the National University Cheikh Anta Diop where I studied sustainable development. On the last day of class, I had one of those life-changing moments. The professor stood me up in front of hundreds of local students and said:

You’re here because you want to learn how to do sustainable development. But what you need to recognize is there is no such thing. The only regions around the world being developed sustainably are places where wealthy nations are extracting natural resources. If you care about reducing environmental damage, start by changing business practices back home.

That message made me question what the heck I was doing in Senegal. I realized that I had much greater opportunity to affect change back home by addressing unsustainable business practices. I returned to the U.S. and redirected my studies toward issues around corporate sustainability.

Your timing turned out to be very good to join AEG’s emerging sustainability efforts. How did you make your way there?

I started looking for a corporate sustainability position after graduation. I expected I’d have to start in a position outside of sustainability and then weave those values into my role. Given my background in theater and production, I was looking at AEG for event management jobs and hoped to bring sustainability into the AEG culture.

At the time my mother was AEG’s vice president of information technology. She was helping me consider entry-level opportunities. Out of the blue, her supervisor mentioned that the CEO, Tim Leiweke, had asked for help to understand how to “make AEG green.” My mom suggested to her boss that he and I speak so that I might give him some pointers regarding first steps.

How much did you have to sell the idea?

The thinking on these areas was already taking shape. Executives were increasingly hearing from AEG’s partners — artists, promoters, athletes, sponsors, governing bodies, and civic groups — that the company needed to find better ways to address the environment. I gave a very aggressive speech on the difference between greenwashing and being truly sustainable, and provided a list of links on sustainability practices. Then I went on to travel. I wasn’t thinking that what just happened was kind of a job interview.

About ten days later, I got an email from AEG saying, “We could really use your support,” and asking if I’d be interested in a two-month engagement to help coordinate a management committee to map out the start of a formal sustainability program for AEG. I was so excited that I cancelled my trip and headed straight back to L.A.

So this was the beginning of AEG’s major push into sustainability?

Yes. In two months, we put together a 120-page report that included ten pages of detailed tasks for each major division of AEG. We presented the report to AEG’s chairman, Philip Anschutz, and to Leiweke. They reviewed it and said, “This is exactly the right direction for the company.”

Mr. Anschutz made it clear to us that energy was his number-one priority. After labor, energy is AEG’s highest cost, and energy prices were near all-time highs. So it offered quick and potentially big savings. He also wanted us to focus on venues we owned and operated. They asked me to stay on as a contractor to begin implementation. About a year later, after the program had a couple of strong wins, they offered me a full-time position as sustainability manager.

What were your biggest obstacles rolling out this program?

AEG’s biggest challenge — and biggest opportunity — is our scale and diverse business model. We have so many different business segments: facilities, concerts, sports, live entertainment, and others. Our venues range from intimate clubs that seat as few as 500 to large stadia and entire “entertainment districts” able to hold up to 115,000. Each of these venues is a different age, with different geographical and climate challenges, varying energy grids, and different municipal infrastructures.

So our first priority was to better understand what was already in place and develop a measurement and reporting program that could identify energy-savings opportunities and monitor their progress across a diverse range of venues.

When you looked at energy use, what did you find?

Initially, we did a few energy audits and site audits at a cross section of venues to identify energy projects that might translate across the portfolio. We quickly realized that there were opportunities around utility bill management and energy procurement.

Two years later, in 2010, we partnered with Summit Energy [of Louisville, Ky.] to develop a global energy strategy for AEG. They helped us identify cost-saving opportunities through rate adjustment and billing accuracy, as well as opportunities to procure energy in open market. They provided software to track and analyze electricity, water, and natural gas use as an extension of their invoicing, bill payment, and carbon accounting services.

You set some ambitious goals. How’s it going?

Until we publish an update to our sustainability report later this year, I can’t be too specific about company-wide achievements. But, we are making major progress toward our targets for 2020, compared with 2007, in the area of energy, waste, and responsible sourcing. These goals include cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 20 percent and achieving 75 percent waste diversion at ten focus venues and events.

Also, where we have direct control over purchasing, we’re aiming to spend half of our budget on what we call “high-impact” goods — those that have the greatest direct impact on human health and the environment — including more efficient lighting, greener janitorial products, high-performance cooling and heating systems, and recycled paper products.

What are some specific examples of AEG’s resource savings?

Right out of the gate, we identified opportunities for high-returns. In 2008, for instance, we installed solar panels at both the Staples Center and Nokia Theater in L.A., saving an average of $55,000 annually. The same year, we retrofitted about 500 urinals to be waterless at all of our Southern California venues. They are saving us more than 20 million gallons of water and some $70,000 in direct water costs each year.

A rule of thumb in sustainability is to eliminate waste first, then substitute green alternatives. How are you approaching this?

We think our staff’s ability to manage buildings more efficiently through small day-to-day tweaks is where we’re really going to make progress. For example, in 2010, through staff training and constant vigilance, we reduced their electricity usage by 30 percent and natural gas consumption by more than half atCitizens Business Bank Arena in Ontario, Calif.

Much of this challenge amounts to motivating staff to change long-standing habits. How do you do it?

The first step is to get them to understand the materials within their facility and their importance.

Take my battery bucket challenge. I’ve had a lot of operations managers tell me, “Sure we collect disposable batteries in our office but there are just not that many.” And I’d say, “I’m going to issue you a challenge. Put a battery bucket in three places where you don’t think there are batteries. Send out an email letting staff know about the new collection points. And let’s bet on how long it will take for that bucket to fill up.” They’ll say, “Oh, it’ll take a year.” It takes one, maybe two weeks, so I’ve won every time.

The second step is to work with them to help identify sustainable solutions.

How do you tackle those who are most resistant to change?

When it comes to sustainability, I think of my colleagues as fitting into three major categories.

There’s one group making decisions because they want to be recognized but also because the decision is in line with their values. Those are the one who are most supportive and easy to work with.

And then there are those focused strictly on success as defined by their job description and who do not necessarily value sustainability personally. These types aren’t necessarily embracing sustainability, but if it’s expected of them, they will get the job done.

Lastly, there’s the complete naysayer: the individual who disagrees with the philosophy of sustainability and doesn’t think human action adversely impacts the environment. They are only able to see results or conclusions that support their belief that the environment doesn’t need our stewardship. Even when we can prove that they’re going to save money, they’ll sometimes still find ways to say no. That’s where the high-level support has been so important: since the owner and CEO said make it so, this attitude simply is no longer acceptable.

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TRUTH SQUAD Checking industry claims with NRDC’s sustainability experts

Influence often comes with experience. Yet, in the relatively young world of corporate sustainability, youthful energy can help catalyze change in large, slow-to-evolve organizations. AEG’s global sustainability director is a case in point. At 26, “Jen Regan is among the best arena greeners on the planet,” says Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which publishes OnEarth.

Hershkowitz has spent the past decade coordinating some of NRDC’s most prominent institutional sustainability initiatives, spanning entertainment — such as the Academy and Grammy Awards — and professional sports, including national league-wide efforts to green baseball, basketball, football, and the U.S. Tennis Association.

As the world’s largest operator of major sporting venues, AEG has unparalleled resources to develop green practices, Hershkowitz says. For example, in Los Angeles, the company hopes to build an NFL stadium dubbed Farmers Field, planned as one of the most environmentally sustainable stadiums in the world, as well as the NFL’s first LEED-certified field. AEG has even pledged to make the facility carbon neutral in part by steering more fans onto public transit. In a notoriously car-crazed city, it’s an audacious goal.

AEG’s bid is typical of how its sustainability push has heated up a green race among teams and sports leagues, says Hershkowitz. “These owners are really competitive,” he says. “Each season, it seems like a different owner is trying to out-green previous efforts.”

The company’s green agenda extends beyond sports venues, but to Hershkowitz, sports is a particularly potent industry in which to promote sustainability practices. “Just 13 percent of Americans follow science, but 61 percent follow sports. If we can move things there environmentally, its popularity opens the door to much broader change at the political level.”

For all of AEG’s progress, there’s still plenty to focus on, Hershkowitz says. The company needs to extend its reach to smaller sites and deepen its influence over operations into new areas. For instance, AEG can work with independent and in-house vendors — which provide everything from popcorn to white-linen restaurant meals — to shift them to use more sustainable materials and even offer healthier foods, he says. — Adam Aston

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Check out the original here: http://www.onearth.org/article/meet-the-change-makers-aeg-turns-up-volume-on-sustainability

Starbucks’ green scorecard: A few full cups, two half empty | GreenBiz

Starbucks' green scorecard: A few full cups, two half empty

Starbucks’ latest self-assessment of the impact of its operations on the globe — measured in terms of energy, the environment, communities and agriculture — reflects healthy progress, moderated by a dash of frustration on some challenging fronts.

Call it: A few full cups and a couple half empty.

The good news is big gains on renewables, energy efficiency and cup recycling. Water consumption rose, however, and use of reusable cups has barely budged.

At its annual shareholders meeting today, Starbucks released its 11th annual Global Responsibility Report, detailing the coffee giant’s performance in 2011. Check out the report at www.starbucks.com/GRreport. I got an advance look at the report, along with the opportunity to speak with Ben Packard, Starbucks’ vice president of global responsibility.

Here’s my take on what’s full, half full, or half empty in the 2011 report.

Full cups

Front-of-store recycling. Starbucks has been chiseling away at a commitment to boost the recyclability of its cold and hot beverage cups for many years. It has set interlinked goals of developing “comprehensive recycling solutions for our paper and plastic cups by 2012” and implementing “front-of-store recycling in our company owned stores by 2015.” (Starbucks has nearly complete recycling rates for cardboard packaging from its receiving, replenishment and other back-of-store operations.)

The goals are daunting: About 80 percent of the Starbucks’ containers leave its stores and, of the share that can be re-captured on site, recyclers have shown little love for the hard-to-reprocess plastic-lined paper cups. (The chain’s plastic cups, made of No.1 plastic, are proving somewhat easier to sell into recycling flows.)

Boosting recycling of paper cups, in particular, has required near herculean efforts — not just putting out a bin in the front of a store, but ensuring that haulers and recyclers in a given market will take the cups and process them into new materials. The chain has piloted recycling in a variety of cities, including New York in 2010, an effort profiled by Jonathan Bardelline in GreenBiz here.

As one of a series of city-by-city trials, Starbucks has run a pilot in Chicago area stores, for example, to take used cups, and remake them into napkins that come back to the store. To lick this problem, the coffee chain has instigated three industry wide Cup Summits, inviting competitors, peers and service providers to collaborate on recycling solutions.

The efforts are showing progress. In 2011, Starbucks saw a big gain in the share of its stores with front-of-store recycling, to 18 percent of company-owned stores in US and Canada, up from 5 percent in 2010. The number of sites where you can drop your white and green cup into a recycling bin now exceeds 1,000.

The fastest progress, Packard said, has been in “big markets where conditions were right in terms of hauling, recycling infrastructure and demand for end products.” These include most of Canada, Chicago, and parts of Southern California.

Energy per store and LEED. After resetting its energy efficiency targets in 2010, the chain made big gains over the past year. Working towards a goal of cutting its energy intensity by 25 percent by 2015 against a 2008 baseline, the coffee giant’s progress is gaining momentum.

It notched an improvement of 7.5 percent, bringing down to 6.29 kwh the average electricity used per square foot per store per month in company-owned stores in the U.S. and Canada. In 2008, that figure started out at 6.8 kwh

The biggest slice of those gains, Packard explained, came from replacing in-store lighting with LEDs.

.The next frontier of efficiency, he explained is wiring up stores to enable real time remote monitoring and control of HVACs, ice makers and other big energy users.

In a related development, Starbucks reported that three quarters of its newly built company-owned stores (121 of 161) have achieved LEED certification. That share is constrained, Packard explained, in part because Starbucks has limited control over the environment of some its buildings it leases space in.“

Renewable energy. Towards a 2015 goal of buying all of its electric power from renewable sources, the coffee chain reported a big increase in the total volume of green power it bought in 2011: 873 megawatt hours (mwh), up from 580 mwh last year.

Yet despite that big uptick, the share of renewables of total power the company reported appears to have retreated to 50 percent, from 58 percent last year.

What gives? Previous data covered U.S. and Canada only, while for 2011 the coffee chain tallied up its global purchase of renewables — a good move.

Half full

Water. In past years, Starbucks has made laudable gains cutting the volume of water used in its outlets by, for example, by shutting off the all-day flow of water through “dippers,” used to rinse kitchenware.

From 2008 through 2010, those efforts cut water use by nearly a fifth, to less than 20 gallons per square foot of retail space per month.

But in 2011, that figure edged back up by 5 percent. While some of the culprit was higher sales of beverages, the main culprit, Packard told me, are revisions to the way pitchers are cleaned.

That’s under close scrutiny for next year. Plus, “We’re working with equipment vendors to see what we can squeeze out there — from water filtration, to ice makers, it all adds up,” said Packard.

Half empty

Re-useable cups. One of the biggest steps Starbucks could take to lower the impact of its operations would be to get its customers to switch to reusable tumblers. Even though its cups are made of 10 percent recycled pulp, the billions of hot beverages it serves annually translate into virgin trees being cut, pulped, cooked and formed into paper — a very energy intensive process.

Yet breaking customer’s cup-to-go habit remains one of the most stubborn tasks on Starbuck’s eco-punch list. GreenBiz first highlighted the slow progress in 2010.

The chain served just 1.9 percent of total beverage sales in reusable containers last year. That figure has barely budged since 2009, when it debuted at 1.5 percent. That same year, the chain set out a goal of serving 25 percent of beverages in “reusable serverware or tumblers” by 2015.

With this report, Starbucks has revised that target: To serve 5 percent of beverages in “personal tumblers” by 2015.

Packard explained that the goal has proven elusive for a number of reasons. Given that about a fifth of sales are consumed on the premises, “We thought we could effectively boost the use of in-store ceramics,” he said, to make up the bulk of that 25 percent goal. Yet that’s proven challenging: Shrinkage from breakage and theft of the mugs is another barrier.

Spurring the use of tumblers isn’t much easier. Starbucks trialed some behavioral incentives to boost tumbler use in Seattle test sites, but found the response lower than it hoped for. Starbucks currently offers customers a dime discount if they bring their own mug.

For 2012, Packard said, the chain is rebooting efforts to encourage the use of ceramic-ware in store. The latest store designs position reusable mugs in plain sight behind baristas, cuing customers to opt for ceramic and accelerating order processing.

Increasing the value of the 10-cent cup discount isn’t something Starbucks is likely to tinker with. “I don’t think it’s the amount, necessarily” said Packard, “Charging 5 cents for plastic bags wasn’t what triggered the big switch there. It was part of a larger behavioral shift.”

Fair point. But I’m not sure Starbucks should let go of that lever. In the case of plastic bag fees, the value of that nickel charge was probably less important than the repetition of the message that the bag comes at a cost.

Makes me wonder: Perhaps a similar tact could drive greater change at Starbucks? Rather than only reward the virtuous behavior of bringing in a tumbler, why not also identify more clearly the cost of each paper cup in an order.

Without changing prices, the chain could, for instance, simply break out a nickel “cup cost” charge on every receipt. It’d be critical to communicate to consumers that this isn’t an extra fee, but an existing cost they can avoid — and then some — by bringing in a tumbler. It’s worth a shot, or two.

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I’ve focused mostly on resource use and recycling here. Starbucks has also reported progress in its coffee farming and processing program, labor and community issues. Here’s the company’s summary of its work:

Youth Action Grants: Starbucks exceeded its 2015 community goal to engage 50,000 young people in community activities by engaging more than 50,000 in 2011.

Coffee Purchasing: Increased purchases of coffee sourced under C.A.F.E. Practices from 84 percent to 86 percent in 2011.

Farmer Support: Starbucks provided $14.7 million to organizations that make loans to coffee farmers, working toward a goal of $20 million by 2015.

Forest Carbon Programs: Continued work in coffee-growing communities in Chiapas, Mexico, and Sumatra, Indonesia, through Starbucks partnership with Conservation International, demonstrating how coffee farmers can adapt to and address climate change while increasing their income.

Community Service: Starbucks put a special focus on community service for its 40th anniversary celebration. In 2011, Starbucks more than doubled the number of hours from the year before with 442,000 hours contributed. Starbucks is working toward its goal of generating one million hours annually by 2015.
Photo of a latte via Shutterstock.com. Infographics courtesy of Starbucks.