Feeding Sandy’s victims, conflict minerals ruling challenged and M&S shows that where there’s muck there’s brass

M&S turns food waste to energy

Marks & Spencer is making good on its Plan A sustainability commitment to source 100% “green” electricity and send zero waste to landfill, and has a new anaerobic digestion (AD) plant to its roster of small-scale energy suppliers that will turn company food waste into electricity.

M&S recently signed a power purchase agreement with waste management firm Shanks and Energen Biogas in Glasgow, Scotland, which will convert discarded food into biogas for renewable energy generation, as well as digestate to use as nutrient-rich soil conditioner. M&S will buy about 19GWh per year of electricity from the new AD plant, which would provide enough energy to power about 33 M&S Simply Food stores.

According to Gio Patellaro, head of energy at M&S, the company sources 180GWh of renewable energy each year from 22 small-scale suppliers, including other AD plants.

“As a company committed to creating a more sustainable business, we have been actively encouraging the uptake of low-carbon technologies since 2006, including anaerobic digestion for generating renewable electricity,” says Patellaro. “AD will play a bigger role in M&S’s small-scale generation mix not only from an environmental perspective but also operationally, as it reduces considerably imbalance risk charges across renewable portfolios.”

JetBlue delivers food trucks

After Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast of the United States and left tremendous damage in its wake, New York-based airline JetBlue found an innovative way to bring food to some of the most damaged areas without ever taking flight. 

The idea started with a partnership JetBlue developed with the Belgian food truck company Wafels & Dinges just a month before Sandy. The two had collaborated previously for an event at the international arrivals terminal extension at JFK airport. As the local victims of Sandy didn’t require the use of planes for aid delivery, JetBlue thought that food trucks would be an efficient and effective way to deliver hot meals to those in need, says JetBlue’s Allison Steinberg.

From this single collaboration grew a relationship with the New York City Food Truck Association, which was already keen on getting involved in the relief effort. Through JetBlue’s sponsorship, more than 25,000 meals (worth roughly $175,000) from 20 food trucks were delivered in four days across heavily damaged areas of New York and New Jersey, including downtown Manhattan, the Rockaways, Hoboken, and Staten Island.

Inspired by the initiative’s success, others started backing the Food Truck Association’s aid work, including the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City and the Film Food Festival. The association also launched its own fundraising effort on indiegogo.com, raising $52,000 in just five days. In total in the aftermath of the storm, more than 120,000 warm, delicious food truck meals were distributed.

SEC in court over conflict minerals

The US Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) are challenging the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over its conflict minerals rule accompanying Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

The act says companies must publicly disclose the use of conflict minerals originating from the Democratic Republic of the Congo or a neighbouring country, and disclose their chain of custody to the SEC.

The two business groups filing the petition for review to the US court of appeals for the DC Circuit have asked that this final rule to the Dodd-Frank Act be “modified or set aside in whole or in part”. No further details about the case have been disclosed.

“The business community understands the seriousness of the strife occurring in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the need to implement solutions to bring an end to the violence,” say the plaintiffs. “However, while well-intentioned, the SEC’s final rule on conflict minerals is not an effective approach to this complex issue. Our organisations suggested constructive changes to earlier proposals to make a final rule workable. However, the final conflict mineral rule imposes an unworkable, overly broad and burdensome system that will undermine jobs and growth and may not achieve Congress’s overall objectives.”

Campaign groups such as Global Witness are incensed by the legal challenges. “Implementing Section 1502 will carry a cost for companies, [but] the problem is that the industry associations behind the lawsuit do not appear to be taking into consideration the human costs to continuing with business as usual,” says Annie Dunnebacke at Global Witness. “It’s morally indefensible for multi-billion-dollar American brands to source raw materials in a way that exposes Congolese citizens to rape, murder, enslavement and impoverishment. Furthermore, independent studies into the costs of implementing Section 1502 have shown that the figures put forward by certain industry players have been flawed.”

The Section 1502 rule has been a constant source of tension among business groups, the SEC and watchdog groups. If implemented, it could initially cost companies billions of dollars in order to be compliant, plus hundreds of millions a year for ongoing compliance.

The UK’s sustainable palm oil commitment

The UK Department for Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), in cooperation with key UK business organisations, has signed a commitment to “work towards” sourcing 100% sustainable palm oil by 2015.

According to Defra, the UK is one of the most influential players in the EU market for palm oil. The commitment signatories include a wide range of powerful players, such as the UK government, the Agricultural Industries Commission, the British Hospitality Association, the British Retail Consortium, the Food and Drink Federation and WWF UK.

“Through coordinated action, the UK supply chain can influence other consumers and producers and support the global drive to make palm oil production and consumption more sustainable,” Defra says.

But not all organisations are happy with the statement’s specifics – or lack thereof. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) says that while the government should be praised for putting palm oil on the national agenda, the commitment falls short of more rigorous targets.

“Retailers have already pledged to meet the world’s most rigorous standards on 100% certified sustainable palm oil, and said they will do it by the end of 2015, because that’s the way to generate a market for sustainable product and eliminate the rest,” says BRC’s director of food and sustainability, Andrew Opie. “To make the scale of difference required, [the] government should set a proper example by making its own buying practices as tough as retailers’ are and insisting on the same from manufacturers and other sectors.”

In particular, the BRC would like all signatories to sign up to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil standard, and firmly commit to sourcing 100% sustainable palm oil no later than 2015. 

IT privacy improvements

A host of major tech companies including Google, Microsoft and Nokia have joined together to create a voluntary association in Germany that enables German citizens to remove their personal information from geo-mapping services.

The group, known as Verein Selbstregulierung Informationswirtschaft (IT Self Regulatory Association or SRIW), was formed as a result of the hubbub caused after Google launched its Street View product in Germany, which raised serious citizen and government concerns about privacy.

Consequently, the group created a website where people can easily request that images of their homes, licence plates and other such personal effects be blurred from geo-mapping images, and file specific complaints about companies they feel are violating Germany’s data protection laws. 

According to a spokesman at Microsoft, SRIW’s scope will go beyond geo-location services and serve as a general platform for all IT self-regulatory issues. “The main goal is to reduce juridical regulation in single cases to the greatest possible extent,” Microsoft says. “Self-regulation is an instrument that can be established and adapted – if needed – much faster than legislation.”

Newsweek Green Rankings

The Brazilian arm of bank Santander, Indian IT provider Wipro, and Brazilian banking and financial services firm Bradesco were the top three environmental performers in Newsweek’s fourth annual Green Rankings of the 500 largest global companies.

Not so green, however, was Monsanto, which came in 498th place, followed by Coal India in 499th place and Singaporean agribusiness Wilmar at the very bottom spot.

Newsweek works with Trucost and Sustainalytics to produce its two Green Rankings lists for the biggest publicly traded companies in the US and worldwide. A company’s “green score” is determined by three elements: an environmental impact score (up to 45 points), an environmental management score (45 points), and an environmental disclosure score (10 points), for a total score out of 100.

The environmental impact score looks at more than 700 metrics to determine a “comprehensive, quantitative, and standardised” assessment of companies’ global operations. The environmental management score analyses companies’ environmental performance, evaluated by the policies, targets, certifications and other eco-related systems they have in place. And the environmental disclosure score looks at how transparent companies are being about their impact, as well as the breadth and depth of their environmental reporting.