Ikea’s town planning, Apple re-registers products and extractive industry human rights
Ikea builds a London neighbourhood
Ikea has got the green light from London’s planning and development committees to build an ambitious mixed-use neighbourhood in east London.
Officially, the Strand East project belongs to Ikea’s property development arm, LandProp Holding, and will cover a swathe of industrial land in Stratford, just south of Olympic Park.
Strand East will be a combined residential and commercial site, featuring 1,200 new homes for purchase and rent for a range of socio-economic levels; 620,000 square feet (58,000 sq metres) of commercial space for shops, cafes and restaurants; a 350-room Marriott hotel; a “creative zone” to attract smaller, creative businesses; shared community space; a new bus route; cycle routes, and new parks. And there won’t be an Ikea store in sight.
A running thread throughout the project is an effort to preserve the site’s industrial heritage and historical buildings, and to design sustainably to help minimise traffic and carbon emissions, improve water quality, and reduce energy use. The site should be complete by 2020.
“Strand East will be an outstanding place to live and work, built with the long term in mind and to the highest standards, respecting the environment and celebrating the heritage of the area,” says Andrew Cobden, country manager of LandProp UK. “We see Strand East as a place for families and businesses to grow and put down strong roots.”
Microsoft launches start-up fund
Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, has launched its first incubator/angel fund programme for online and mobile-centric start-ups.
The Bing Fund will be financed through angel investments by Microsoft’s search engine company Bing, and rely on the myriad technological and intellectual resources of the Microsoft team.
Specifically, Bing Fund entrepreneurs will have subsidised use of software, access to Microsoft “subject matter experts” and executives, and office space access at Microsoft’s Washington (state) campus. They can also solicit advice from Bing Fund’s staff in design, engineering, marketing, communications and business.
The fund will focus on fewer than a dozen early stage start-ups for four to eight months. Once a start-up “graduates,” another company will take its place. Microsoft, in turn, gets front row access to some of the world’s most promising tech companies that it could ultimately partner with or acquire.
The fund has enrolled its first two start-ups: Buddy, an app development company, and Pinion, an advertising service for online gaming companies.
Applying start-ups should be incorporated in the US and have a full-time team, as well as a solid semblance of a business plan and at minimum a working prototype of their site. Rahul Sood, general manager of Bing Fund, says it will work with other accelerator programmes such as TechStars to find top-notch entrepreneurs, and is also looking out for “repeat entrepreneurs”.
“We wanted to come up with a new innovation model that helps start-ups get focused and reach critical mass – in an entrepreneur-friendly way,” Sood says. “We believe that combining the fresh insights of start-ups with Microsoft’s expertise and tremendous reach creates a unique formula for driving the industry forward.”
Extractive industry human rights survey
Mining and resource companies are becoming increasingly aware of and open to the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, according to a new survey by the international audit and advisory firm Mazars.
The survey was sent to 500 listed extractive companies in the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa to assess their application of human rights policies, with a focus on the UN’s provide, respect and remedy framework of 31 guiding principles, adopted in 2011.
While just 62 of the 500 companies responded to the survey, Richard Karmel at Mazars is still “quite pleased” to have a 10% response rate on this relatively new subject.
The results revealed that 65% of respondents are “actively working towards compliance with the principles”, which Karmel says means not only protecting the rights of their employees, but also the communities in which they operate, plus those affected by the supply chain.
However, only 55% said they planned to implement their own human rights policies and procedures over the next two years, and even fewer (40%) are documenting their compliance in line with UN guidelines, or using third-party evaluation (37%).
“One of our key concerns is that the front end of most annual reports are seen as PR on behalf of the company,” Karmel says. “For an area as important as human rights, we believe that some form of independent reporting is required of a company’s human rights compliance, in order to give the company’s words and actions more credibility.”
Hershey’s CocoLink mobile phone app
The Hershey Company has partnered with the Ghana Cocoa Board and the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF) to create a simple yet effective mobile outreach tool called CocoLink, which has already delivered 100,000 messages to 4,000 Ghanaian cocoa farmers in the past year, in an effort to share valuable farming and wellbeing practices.
CocoLink sends mobile voice and text messages in the local language or in English to educate farmers in even the very remote regions of Ghana about best practices in farming, safety and crop disease prevention, among other subjects. It should reach more than 25,000 famers in 2012.
According to Hershey’s Jeff Beckman, mobile technology was the obvious medium for the programme, as more than two-thirds of Ghana’s cocoa farmers now have mobile phones.
Hershey is responsible for the programme’s funding, while the on-the-ground training and implementation is run by WCF and its partner World Education.
CocoLink will soon expand to Ivory Coast, and is working with the Rainforest Alliance to add messaging about conservation and climate change.
HSBC and Mexican drug lords
HSBC underwent a very public shaming at a recent US Senate hearing to address the bank’s history of major vulnerabilities to money laundering and terrorist financing.
The US Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations oversaw a year-long investigation into HSBC’s operations and presented a whopping 330-page report at the July hearing, accusing the bank of exposing the US financial system to money laundering by Mexican drug cartels, Middle Eastern terrorist financing groups, and other unsavoury actors.
The subcommittee focused on five areas of abuse: servicing high risk affiliates such as HSBC Mexico (which laundered billions of dollars through the US) and Mexican “casas de cambio” or exchange houses, which are woefully unregulated; circumventing the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s safeguards that prevent transactions with illegal actors; disregarding terrorist financing connections; clearing suspicious bulk travellers cheques (including $290m over four years); and offering over 2,000 accounts to bearer share corporations, the owners of which are nearly impossible to track.
“HSBC’s compliance culture has been pervasively polluted for a long time,” says Carl Levin, a US senator and chairman of the Senate subcommittee. “Its recent change in leadership says it’s committed to cleaning house. That commitment is welcome surely, but it will take more than words for the bank to change course.”
HSBC says it’s working hard to make changes that will prevent such rampant cases of abuse from happening again. The bank currently has 7,200 offices in more than 80 countries, and made a profit of $22bn last year.
Apple rejoins Epeat registry
Nearly as quickly as Apple pulled 39 of its products from the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (Epeat) registry, the cult brand reversed its decision just a month later.
Epeat is a leading global environmental rating system for electronic products, developed by members of the business, non-profit, and academic communities. The system evaluates computer desktops, laptops, and monitors against 51 environmental criteria. While all Epeat-registered products must meet 23 environmental performance criteria, 28 additional (and optional) criteria determine if a product merits Epeat bronze, silver or gold status.
Apple said it initially removed its products from the green registry because its design direction was “not consistent” with the Epeat requirements. But Bob Mansfield, Apple’s senior vice-president for hardware engineering, later released an uncharacteristically public statement about its original positioning, saying: “We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the Epeat rating system. I recognise that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on Epeat.”
Sarah O’Brien of the Green Electronics Council, which implements the Epeat registry, says: “We were very surprised to see Apple depart, since they were one of our earliest subscribers, served on our advisory council, and have been significantly involved in our stakeholder standards development processes. Knowing the strong support for Epeat ratings among purchasers worldwide, we weren’t surprised to see Apple come back in response to customer demand.”
Mansfield did, however, note that the Epeat system could be “a stronger force for protecting the environment” if it was upgraded to include environmental criteria that Apple took on independently, such as removing harmful toxins from its products, including brominated flame retardants and polyvinyl chloride, and comprehensively reporting greenhouse gas emissions for all products.
But for O’Brien, the statement proves somewhat “mystifying,” as the Epeat does address toxic substance reduction – with 11 of 51 criteria targeting this area – and includes criteria about reducing greenhouse gas emissions throughout the product lifecycle. “Apple participates in our standards development processes and is actively involved in the PC and display standard update – a forum where these updates to the criteria will be addressed,” says O’Brien. “All in all, we think our direction and Apple’s are very much aligned.”