The latest sustainable business news
Bring me sunshine
Sainsbury’s says it now hosts Europe’s largest solar array, having covered the roofs of about 30% of its British superstores with photovoltaic panels. The supermarket giant has 16 megawatts of generation capacity installed across 169 sites, which it calculates is enough to simultaneously brew 332m cups of tea.
The company pledges to continue the solar rollout, in a bid to meet a target to reduce its carbon emissions by 30% by 2020 compared to 2005. “We believe the retail sector should take another look at solar energy as a viable way to reduce its impact on the environment. Supermarkets have the equivalent of football fields on their roofs, many of them underutilised,” says Sainsbury’s chief executive Justin King.
Happy workers
Corporate responsibility offers a great career path, with salaries holding up even in times of austerity, according to the CR and Sustainability Salary Survey 2012, published by Acre Resources.
The average salary for a CR professional in the UK is £56,360, according to Acre’s calculations, up from £49,600 in 2008/09. However, the UK lags continental Europe, where the average salary is £69,000. Although there is a 52:48 gender split in the CR workplace in favour of women, female CR professionals earn less: £56,800 (worldwide average) compared to £67,300 for men.
But CR professionals overall are a happy bunch, with 80% reporting job satisfaction
Keeping track
A new standard methodology for measuring the environmental impact of materials, facilities, processes and products in the manufacturing of clothing and shoes will help big brands such as Levis and Nike to better understand their supply chains, according to the standard’s developers, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC). The SAC’s Higg Index is “a self-assessment tool that enables rapid learning through identification of environmental sustainability hot spots”. Companies that use it can “drive behaviour for improvement”. SAC members likely to apply the index include Adidas, C&A, Gap, Marks & Spencer and Wal-Mart.
Long and winding road
There have been yet more twists in the marathon legal case of indigenous Ecuadorians versus oil giant Chevron over pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest in the 1970s and 1980s. A New York judge has said that Chevron could move forward with an attempt to prove that an Ecuadorian court judgement ordering Chevron to pay $18bn was obtained fraudulently. At the same time, an Ecuadorian judge raised the award amount to $19bn.
The plaintiffs secured the order against Chevron in early 2011, but arguments have since raged, with Chevron calling the Ecuadorian litigation a “corrupt lawyers’ fraud and extortion scheme”. Both sides have claimed victory in the latest skirmish. Chevron says it could now “challenge the enforceability of the judgment”, while the Ecuadorians say Chevron has failed to demonstrate fraud. In a related court filing, Chevron says it expected proceedings to continue until at least 2014.
Meanwhile, a Brazilian court recently gave Chevron 30 days to suspend its oil operations in the country. The court said Chevron was not operating wells to the required environmental standard after two serious spills in four months. Chevron says it will appeal.
Making prison pay
US banking giant Goldman Sachs is betting on a scheme to reduce reoffending rates among young prisoners at New York’s Rikers Island prison complex. The bank is providing $9.6m to support a social programme that will provide an Adolescent Behavioural Learning Experience (ABLE) to 16-18 year old inmates. If the programme is judged a success, with re-incarceration rates falling by at least 10%, the city of New York will pay the non-profit group that organises the programme, which in turn will repay the Goldman Sachs loan.
Goldman could lose out if the scheme fails, but it could also make a profit of up to $2.1m if all turns out for the best. The programme is the US’s first social impact bond – an idea pioneered in Britain in 2010, on the basis that it is worth allowing private companies to make profits from such schemes if they reduce the amount the government spends on imprisoning people in the long run
WEEE to go
The European Union has published a law that will tighten up the management of WEEE – waste electrical and electronic equipment. Under the law, EU countries will be obliged by 2016 to collect separately from other waste streams at least at least 45% of the e-waste they produce, rising to 65% in 2019.
The law also includes WEEE recycling goals and puts in place a requirement for retailers of computers, toasters, mobile phones and other EEE to allow consumers to drop off old equipment in their stores, with no obligation to buy new products. Britain presently separately collects about 35% of its WEEE, according to the Environment Agency.
Green fog
Oil companies are not sufficiently forthcoming about the risks of their deepwater drilling operations, or their impact on climate change, making it hard for investors to make informed decisions, according to a new report from sustainable investment network Ceres. The report analysed the disclosures made to the US Securities and Exchange Commission by oil firms of the “material risks” their operations face in difficult regions such as the Arctic.
None of the companies surveyed provided “high quality” risk assessments Ceres says, though climate-relayed disclosures from BP and ENI were judged more helpful than those from Apache, Marathon and ExxonMobil. “Investors deserve better disclosure than this,” says Ceres president Mindy Lubber. “The risks of extracting oil and gas from remote places by ever-more-complex methods are profoundly real, even before considering how climate change and carbon emission mitigation can impact these projects”.
Gun ban
A ban on carrying weapons in the Honduran state of Colon, recently introduced, is in part a response to conflict over land used for palm oil production. Ongoing disputes between landowners and poor farmers, who attempt to occupy land they believe was stolen from them, have led to the deaths of between 60 and 80 people in the last three years.
Much of the allegedly appropriated land is used for the cultivation of African palms on large plantations. Honduran palm oil output has climbed steadily since the 1980s, when landowners started to gain control of large estates, with 70% of the palm oil exported for use in processed foods and cosmetics. The long-running rural disputes are one reason for Honduras’s murder rate of 86 per 100,000 inhabitants – the highest rate in the world.