Bank of America digs deep, M&S’s carbon neutrality and brands that show a bit of bottle

Bank of America’s $50bn green initiative  

The green commitment will centre on four sectors: energy efficiency, renewable energy and energy infrastructure, transportation, and water and waste. The bank will focus its activities primarily on lending, capital markets and advisory activity, carbon finance, equipment finance, and advice and investment solutions for its clients.

BOA is also looking inward at its operations, concentrating on improving key environmental areas with the highest rate of return. For example, reducing its energy consumption by 5% (based on 2004 levels), cutting paper use by 20% (based on its 2010 baseline), and diverting 70% of its global waste from landfills by 2015.

The announcement comes as BOA approaches the end of its 2007, $20bn commitment, which it anticipates meeting by the end of 2012 – more than four years ahead of schedule.

“We’re announcing [our commitment] now because we didn’t want to give the market one minute to think that we don’t take this seriously,” says BOA spokeswoman Britney Sheehan.

“We see the opportunity to help our clients, help our business, and to help the planet. Also, with active discussion in the market about the future of renewable energy, and the UN Rio+20 conference, we thought it important to declare our expanded commitment now.”

BOA’s environmental business initiative doesn’t come without criticism, most notably from the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), which has been campaigning against BOA’s financing of coal projects for years. RAN says the bank gave $6.4bn in underwriting for US coal in 2010 and 2011 alone.

“Bank of America cannot have its cake and eat it too, we cannot applaud its climate and renewable energy commitments while the bank is also playing a leading role in financing the coal industry,” says Amanda Starbuck, RAN’s director of the energy and finance programmes. “Plain and simple, increasing support for renewable energy and not decreasing funding for coal will not do what’s needed to reduce emissions and protect the climate.”

BOA takes a different stance on the issue. Sheehan points out that 40-45% of America’s electricity comes from coal, with most banks having some exposure to coal and its value chain, whether through links with extraction, transportation or basic finance to utilities.

“Despite the rhetoric, any debate about lowering the carbon-intensity of our energy supply has to be taken up at the national or global level – it’s not a bank issue,” says Sheehan. “We are in the business of delivering capital, and our environmental business initiative is a way to support the growing market for renewable and other forms of low-carbon energy as well as energy efficiency in a way that brings the technologies and infrastructure to scale.”

M&S goes carbon-neutral

Marks & Spencer is the first big UK retailer to achieve carbon-neutral status.

In the company’s 2012 How We Do Business report, Marks & Spencer outlines the first five years of progress on Plan A, its sustainability initiative that outlines 180 social and environmental goals.

To reach this milestone, Marks & Spencer cut carbon emissions by 22%, reducing electricity use, improving energy and fuel efficiency, and creating green tariff electricity contracts for all energy used across its facilities. This enables Marks & Spencer to match its electricity needs with energy from renewable sources.

Marks & Spencer is also working with the Carbon Neutral Company to buy offsets that support sustainable projects, such as funding a programme in southern Kenya that helps small-scale farmers generate income from sustainable farming practices, rather than from cutting down forests, and supporting wind farms in northern Turkey and India.

Now that Marks & Spencer has achieved its 2012 energy and fuel efficiency targets, the company is moving on to higher 2015 targets, such as homing in on its suppliers’ operations.

Filtering out the waste

The international recycling company TerraCycle is launching a free programme to collect and recycle cigarette waste in Canada.

While the tobacco and paper in cigarettes is biodegradable, the butts are not. To address the pervasive problem of cigarette waste, TerraCycle has partnered with a large Canadian tobacco manufacturer (which TerraCycle refuses to name) to launch the Cigarette Waste Brigade, which will collect used cigarette butts, foil and plastic packaging that would otherwise be tossed into landfills, and turn it into plastic pallets for industrial use.

Participants can send used filters and accompanying cigarette trash (excluding the recyclable cardboard box) to TerraCycle with a free prepaid UPS shipping label. In turn, they’ll be rewarded with 100 points (or C$1) per pound in weight of waste, which can be donated to a Canadian non-profit group or charity of their choice, or to TerraCycle’s “charity gift” projects with Evergreen and Care Canada, which provide families with water containers, for example.

“There’s no more appropriate organisation than a tobacco company to take responsibility for cigarette waste,” says Denise Barnard of TerraCycle Canada. “Our goal is to make this programme international and partner with an appropriate company in each country.”

Global brands unite to support plant-based PET

Five major brands are joining forces to expand the development and use of 100% plant-based PET materials in their products through the Plant PET Technology Collaborative (PTC).

Coca-Cola, Ford, Heinz, Nike and Procter & Gamble all rely on PET – polyethylene terephthalate – for their products, including plastic bottles, footwear, clothing, and automotive fabric and carpet. For Coca-Cola alone, PET plastic makes up 54% of its packaging.

The PTC was built on Coke’s success with its PlantBottle, which is 30% plant-based and has a lower environmental impact than its previous, standard PET bottles.

According to Coca-Cola spokeswoman Katherine Schermerhorn, the company successfully produced a 100% plant-based bottle several years ago but, as the world’s largest drinks distributor, needed a more viable commercial solution.

How2Recyle label’s growing popularity

The How2Recyle label has built a head of steam and secured further participants – including Yoplait, Estée Lauder, Sealed Air, BJ’s Wholesale Club and the manufacturer Ampac – for the label’s soft launch this summer, when 65 consumer products will don the new label.

How2Recyle was founded in 2007 by the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC), a project of the non-profit group GreenBlue, as SPC members sought to tackle the varied and often confusing world of American recycling labelling systems.

The SPC reviewed a host of other labelling systems, including the UK’s On Pack Recycling Label (OPRL), and spent more than a year finessing the design, in collaboration with member companies, trade associations, the US Federal Trade Commission, government groups, and OPRL/Wrap. The label was also tested on consumers to ensure real-world efficacy.

The label features a simple, telegraphic design illustrating the recyclability of four different packaging types in the US: widely recycled, limited recycling/not recycled in all communities, not yet recycled, and store drop-off.

While the 10 participating brands will initially feature the label on selected products, the long-term goal is to roll out the label across all product lines.

According to Danielle Peacock, GreenBlue project associate, the soft launch will be used to analyse business and consumer feedback, and develop the long-term business model for full implementation of the How2Recycle label.

“Tackling recycling in the United States will take a lot of effort, including improving infrastructure, developing markets, combating cynicism, and educating the public,” says Peacock. “This label is a piece of that puzzle, and works to educate consumers, provides a uniform labelling system across all packaging types, and works to keep the recycling stream clean.”

The original five brands that agreed to use the label are ConAgra Foods, Costco Wholesale, Microsoft, REI and Seventh Generation.

Corporate giving on the up

Corporate philanthropy is on the rise, according to the latest results of three Corporate Giving Standard surveys analysing 144 major companies from 2009 to 2011.

Several notable trends emerged from the research. For one, corporate giving became increasingly focused, with only 4% of companies giving to a multitude of initiatives, while most companies directed giving to a targeted programme area, often focusing on education and/or health and social services.

Employee matching-gift policies were popular, with employee giving campaigns up 6% from 2009 to 2011. And international giving saw a boost, which is largely attributed to growing employee engagement programmes outside companies’ headquarter counties.

The survey was conducted by the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, an international forum dedicated to raising the level and quality of corporate societal engagement, in association with the Conference Board, an independent business membership and research association.

“Companies are making a greater effort to engage with the people whose lives they impact – not just investors, but also employees and the communities that surround them, no matter where they are in the world,” says Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy spokeswoman Sara Adams.

Every little helps

The Times newspaper recently picked up UK retailer Tesco on its reporting about relations with suppliers. Tesco’s newest corporate responsibility report highlights a fall of six percentage points compared with the previous year in the number of suppliers who felt they weren’t treated with respect.

This good news was not what it seemed, the Times suggested, given Tesco had lowered its target figure for this from 80% to 70%. In response to a Times query, the company said that the original questions had changed so the responses were not directly comparable. But, the Times says, this was not borne out by what was reported on Tesco’s website. The company then made some changes, altering some graphics published online. The newspaper’s report pointed out that Tesco’s CR report is “audited internally”.