Moves from Tesco, McDonald's, Heartland Foundation and all the latest from other brands in corporate responsibility this month
Tesco’s hot air
Tesco has reneged on a 2007 pledge to calculate the carbon footprint of its 70,000 product lines and attach Carbon Trust Carbon Reduction Labels to them. Former chief executive Terry Leahy made the promise, but Tesco has now pulled out of the Carbon Trust scheme, saying that the labelling process takes too much time, and other supermarkets have not signed up.
Tesco has said it will continue with some form of carbon footprinting, though no decision on a replacement carbon label has been taken. The Carbon Trust says it is “clearly disappointed”.
Damage assessment
The cost of global environmental damage done by businesses is shooting up, doubling every 14 years, a broad-ranging report published by auditors KPMG International has found. In 2010 the environmental price tag of the activities of 11 key sectors, including food, electricity, oil and gas, and mining, was $854bn. But these costs, in general, are not borne by the companies; rather the price is paid by society overall.
If companies had to pay the bill, it would cost them 41%. The report – Expect the Unexpected: building business value in a changing world – also finds that resource consumption is increasing faster than population, and that “if we fail to alter our patterns of production and consumption, things will begin to go badly wrong”.
Plummet from grace
Two company owners face 16-year prison sentences for neglecting the health of their workers – a quarter of a century after the company closed down. An Italian court in mid-February found that Swiss billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny and Belgian aristocrat Jean-Louis Marie Ghislain de Cartier were culpable for the asbestos-related deaths of people who worked in Italy for Eternit, which made construction products.
When Schmidheiny became Eternit president in 1978, he pledged to phase asbestos out, but the company was still using it in 1986, when it closed its Italian plants. The deaths of about 3,000 former Eternit workers have been attributed to asbestos-related disease.
Schmidheiny and de Cartier plan to appeal, and it is unclear if it will be easy to enforce the sentences, especially on de Cartier, who is 90. Schmidheiny is the founder of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and has written on corporate sustainability.
Smoking gun
A number of major corporations have been exposed as donors to the Heartland Foundation, a US free-market thinktank that campaigns against measures to restrict greenhouse gas emissions on the basis that global warming “has stopped” and anyway “the benefits of a moderate warming are likely to outweigh the costs”.
Documents leaked to DeSmogBlog, which states that its mission is to “clear the PR pollution that clouds climate science”, show that contributions to the Heartland 2012 budget came from, among others, General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Time Warner, while Microsoft provided free software licences. Donations will be spent on initiatives such as a plan to provide to schools materials disputing the link between human activity and climate change.
Waste scandal
The interception at the end of January of a “massive” consignment of 113 containers of toxic waste at Tanjung Priok Port, Indonesia, shows that international agreements designed to control hazardous waste exports are not being enforced, according to campaign groups.
The containers, each weighing about 28 tonnes, were labelled as scrap metal but contained e-waste, chemicals and contaminated soil. The Basel Action Network and other groups said the illegal shipments demonstrated that the Basel convention, which restricts international trade in dangerous waste, is being flouted. The shipments were sent from Felixstowe and Rotterdam. British and Dutch customs officials are investigating.
Monsanto in the dock
Companies in France might have to be much more careful about the information they provide to users of their products in the wake of a French court judgment against Monsanto. The company was found liable in February for neurological and respiratory damage suffered by farmer Paul François, which was directly linked to his use of a Monsanto herbicide.
The court found that although the weed-killer had been authorised for use in France for 40 years, and was labelled with safe-use information, Monsanto must still “fully compensate” François. The judgment was the first of its type in France, and served as a warning to companies that they must provide ever more precise and detailed safe-use information. Monsanto said it would appeal against the ruling. The weed-killer in question, Lasso, has been withdrawn from sale in France.
Tariff turnaround
Britain’s coalition government is calling for comments on a revised system of feed-in tariffs for energy from renewable sources, after a previous attempt to cut the tariff for solar power was rejected by the courts.
Feed-in tariffs are above-market rate prices paid for renewable electricity, in order to encourage renewable generation. The government had planned to halve from December 2011 the price paid to households for solar power, a move that critics said would have taken away the incentive for homeowners to put solar panels on their roofs.
The revised tariff system would cover solar and wind power and other renewable sources, and would put in place a less-dramatic series of cuts. Friends of the Earth said the new plan was a “significant improvement”. The feed-in tariffs consultation is open until April 3.
Bitter twitter
A plan by McDonald’s to promote itself via Twitter has backfired badly. McDonald’s set up #McDstories with the intention of spreading “promoted tweets”, containing positive news about the company’s suppliers.
But the #McDstories feed quickly became a catalogue of abuse, stories about unpleasant items found in McDonalds food, and criticism of the firm’s practices. “McDonald’s, if you knew sow stalls were cruel, why have you been using them all these years?” was one relatively mild example. “Within an hour, we saw that it wasn’t going as planned,” said McDonald’s social media director Rick Wion.
Kicked out
The United Nations Global Compact said in mid-February that it had passed an unwelcome but necessary milestone: the number of companies expelled from the Global Compact for not reporting on their progress passed 3,000.
With the expulsions taken into account, the Global Compact now numbers about 7,000 participant businesses.It has a target of 20,000 corporate participants by 2020. “The fact remains that a large majority of the world’s businesses have not yet made any commitment to universal principles, acting as a drag on sustainability efforts,” the Global Compact says.