Social Responsibility and Sustainability News

Since Fisker Automotive rolled the Karma, a four-door luxury plug-in hybrid sedan with a price tag of $103,000, off of the production line in December, the California-based company has been plagued with problems. At the end of December, Fisker issued a recall because of a battery pack coolant leak that could have caused the Karma to short-circuit. A few weeks later, Fisker issued another recall for the sedan because of a software problem. A few months later, in February, Fisker announced that it is renegotiating some terms of the Department of Energy (DOE) agreement for the $336 million balance on its $529 million loan. A month later, the Karma died during a Consumer Reports test. Later in March, Fisker announced that it will replace the batteries in the Karma after the manufacturer A123 admitted there is a glitch.

Things are finally looking up for Fisker and its luxury sedan. Fisker recently announced that during the first four months of the year, it made over $100 million. The company also delivered 1,000 Karmas to in the U.S. and Europe since December. Business Green reports that Fisker hopes to sell 4,000 by the end of the year.

Craft brewing is an industry that is feel-good in more ways than one. Boasting more than $8.7 billion in total retail sales in 2011 from the nearly 2000 American craft breweries (the highest total since the 1880s, per theBrewers Association), the craft brewing industry proves that it is serious business. By creating a collaborative culture that emphasizes high quality products, the craft brewing world serves up powerful lessons.

Lesson 1: Find your passion

Placing an emphasis on the “craft” in craft beer creates a culture of excellence. People are drawn to the craft beer world by their dreams, passion, and love of good beer. And the fact that it’s really fun. Currently the craft beer industry provides an estimated 103,585 US jobs.

The following post is part of a CSRHub series focusing on 10 trends that are driving corporate transparency and disclosure in the coming year. To follow the discussion of each trend, watch for posts on the CSRHub blog every week. CSRHub (a 3p sponsor) – offers sustainability and corporate social responsibility ratings on nearly 5,000 of the world’s largest publicly traded companies. 3p readers get 40% off CSRHub’s professional subscriptions with promo code “TP40.”

Do you want to work for a socially responsible company? Do you care if your employer’s social and environmental performance is consistent with your values? Insisting on a job that respects your moral commitments as well as your paycheck is a prominent trend in today’s workforce, especially with younger workers. As companies assess the challenges and benefits of effective sustainability and/or CSR efforts, employee preference, retention, and engagement is an increasingly important element.

According to a 2011 PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) study, 88 percent of graduate students and young professionals factor an employer’s CSR position into their job decision. And 86 percent would consider leaving a job if their employer’s CSR performance no longer held up.

Earlier this month, Triple Pundit teamed up with The Can Van to better understand the connection between two of our favorite topics: sustainability and beer!

We had the unique opportunity to sit down and share a beer at the 29th annual Craft Brewers Conferencewith craft beer all-stars including Sierra Nevada, New Belgium, Bison Organic Beer, and more. With each new industry professional we met, and every brew we enjoyed, it came as no surprise that our appreciation for beer deepened.  These candid conversations helped us develop a clearer picture of the integral role sustainability plays in the beer industry. And that made us pretty happy about our choice in adult beverages.

We learned that you can gain more than just money by collaborating with your industry peers, that breweries (on the whole) are important community stewards, and there are a number of different ways a business can view its commitment to sustainability.

Some odd things have been happening at the intersection of voting, guns, climate change and cigarettes. Last week, retail giantAmazon.com joined a growing list of major companies that have severed their ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a lobbying group that has worked effectively on voting rights,  gun use, and climate change issues. Also this month, the Heartland Institute, a lobbying organization with a long history of thwarting anti-smoking legislation, has seen its membership drop over its activities related to climate change.

If you have been trying to make sense of how these two powerful organizations have suddenly found themselves on the rocks, well, so have we. There are a number of ways to look at the situation, and one way is through the lens of media and messaging.

Back in the waning days of the GW Bush administration, the EPA approved a permit issued by the State of Indiana, long known for its laxity in environmental affairs, to BP, to expand a refinery used to distill petroleum from Canadian tar sands oil, one of the dirtiest forms of fossil fuel known to man. The permit had long been opposed by environmental groups includingNRDC and Sierra Club.

The Obama administration decided to reexamine the situation in light of environmental and health impacts, and a new consent decree was issued today which calls on BP to clean up its Whiting refinery at an estimated cost of $400 million. The money will pay for increased pollution monitoring and control equipment. This new ruling was issued on the grounds that the existing permit, “did not accurately reflect the pollution realities of the Whiting refinery’s expansion.”

According to EPA estimates, the new equipment will eliminate some 4,000 tons of regulated polluted per year, including: dangerous volatile organic compounds, sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides. Additionally, the installed monitoring equipment will collect data that will shed light on the pollution generated by this type of operation, data than will be usefully applied to other facilities. The consent decree was signed by the State of Indiana, BP, the Department of Justice, the EPA, and various environmental groups.

McDonald’s shareholders yesterday overwhelmingly voted against a shareholder proposal that pushed the fast food titan to undertake a nutrition report of the company’s food products. The motion was submitted by Corporate Accountability International, a consumer advocacy group representing a shareholder concerned about obesity and other children’s health issues, on behalf of a shareholder.

Naturally McDonald’s insisted the proposal was a few fries short of a Happy Meal and advised its shareholders in the company’s most recent proxy statement to vote against the proposition. And the shareholders’ vote was definitive: 95.6 percent of all votes were a NO. Andrew Bremer, a medical professor at Vanderbilt University who spoke in favor of the proposal at yesterday’s annual meeting, made the argument that the company’s contribution to obesity was putting the company’s shareholders at risk. Butthe proposal only did marginally better than a similar item submitted last year.

Last week the state of Hawaii introduced a state-wide ban on plastic bags, becoming the first US state to do so. In spite of significant loopholes, this is a very brave move as plastic bags cause untold environmental problems.

Now the city of Los Angeles has banned plastic bagsbecoming the largest US city with a ban. Although it is not the first California city to institute a ban, the inclusion of LA to this list is newsworthy. 

Stores throughout LA will be required to ‘phase out’ plastic bags by the end of the year. Once the  ban ordinance is enacted, larger stores will have six months to stop handing out plastic bags and smaller stores will have up to a year. After this time, all retailers will have to charge 10 cents for each bag that they provide to customers.

The ban will keep a whopping 2.7 billion plastic bags used each year from ending up in the trash. This will significantly reduce the amount of waste that goes to landfills as well as environmental pollutants. Plastic bags are not only an environmental hazard but also create havoc by being a major cause of litter as well as by blocking waterways.

Read more about this project

To make a cookstove into a carbon credit is one serious abstraction, isn’t it?

Take a region where charcoal is the cooking fuel of choice, switch it out for a cleaner burning fuel that doesn’t contribute to global warming quite so dramatically, then, somehow, track the whole thing accurately enough that it’s possible to measure the tons of emissions the switch represents.

Finally, sell the avoided tons on a carbon market to companies that are looking to offset their own over-indulgence or maybe organizations that want to be carbon negative, doing their part to reduce global warming. The calculations had better be accurate or else those credits will not be worth very much in the long run.

At their best, cookstove carbon credit projects like these are lauded for their co-benefits – not only do the cleaner stoves reduce the global warming potential of the cooking method, but they also reduce soot which means lower asthma rates (and cleaner homes – of great benefit to the women who have to clean up after dinner). Done right, a project like this can even jumpstart a new local sustainable business like CleanStar Mozambique.

There are obvious environmental and health benefits to cycling, however the financial rewards of cycling are coming to light with a new report from the League of American Bicyclists, Sierra Club, and National Council of La Raza (NCLR). According to them, cyclists in the U.S. save a whopping $4.6 billion every year on gas and transportation costs.

The report coincides with National Bike to Work Day and more than 1 million Americans are expected to participate in hundreds of events across the country, showcasing bicycles as a healthy, affordable and efficient form of transportation. According to the report, the highlights include:

CleanStar Mozambique’s founders and investors have a crazy idea that they can make the lives of a few hundred thousand people in Mozambique a lot better, avoid climate-change inducing deforestation, and make money at the same time.

RP Siegel shared their six-point plan with us back in September, but in case you missed it, here’s the lowdown: pay farmers (who are otherwise sitting idle) to grow cassava, incentivize them to grow some healthier food products while they’re at it, turn the cassava into ethanol, develop an-ethanol-burning stove that hits all sorts of pain points for the women of urban centers who are otherwise stuck with dirty, inefficient charcoal stoves, and, magically, profit!

The project is still in it’s infancy, but the founding team seems to have thought of almost everything and are pretty darn dedicated to making their project a true triple-bottom-line business.

By Gerad Hoyt, docSTAR 

The paperless office – at this point it’s becoming a little cliché. We’ve all heard for years about how in the near future our society and business will become totally paperless. The truth is, we’ll probably never be paperless due to the many areas where digital simply can’t match the tried and true paper and pen. However, many parts of our society are still consuming far too much paper. Most paper consumption comes from an inability or unwillingness to change our ways, as well as a lack of clear incentives to entice a reduction in the usage of paper. The reality is, your paper is actually costing you dearly. Here’s some food for thought:

• The average worker in an office uses 10,000 sheets of paper annually.
• It can cost up to 31 times the original cost to send information on paper (printing, copying, postage, storage, filing, recycling, etc.).
• 7.5 billion documents are created and 15 trillion copies are made each year.
• The average four drawer cabinet costs about $25,000 to fill and $2,000 per year to maintain.

These stats are staggering but knowing that most offices simply cannot go 100 percent paperless, there are a few key techniques for incentivizing reduced paper consumption and technology that when applied over time and in conjunction have a dramatic impact.

This is part three of a three part series introducing the renewable aviation fuel market in partnership with The Carbon War Room & reprinted from CCW Magazine. Read part one here, and two here.

In articles yesterday and Tuesday, we explored how no sector of the world’s economy is more ripe and ready for the Carbon War Room’s approach to emissions reduction than aviation.

Renewable fuels hold great promise for addressing the aviation industry’s carbon impacts, and innovators and investors alike are clamoring to offer their solutions to rising fossil fuel costs and environmental considerations.

The following are the top ten contenders as determined by renewablejetfuels.org:

3p Editor Jen Boynton is in Mozambique this week along with TreeHugger’s Brian Merchant to get the full story on a remarkable triple-bottom-line business model. Read on…

There’s no denying that charcoal cookstoves are a huge problem in Africa. Used to cook meals in many family homes, they contribute to massive deforestation to create the charcoal, which is expensive to buy, and when they are operated, they fill homes (and lungs) with dirty black soot. And, it’s hard to control the temperature of the cooking flame. Imagine cooking by an indoor campfire for every meal of your life.

There are many companies and NGOs working to attack the problem from different angles. We’ve covered solar cookstoves a few times here on TriplePundit before, and they have an obvious benefit with their clean, free fuel. However, they still lack the ability to control temperature and are difficult to use indoors unless you have a lot of windows. None of these solutions has managed to gain traction despite the multi-million dollar economic opportunity they represent.

One company, CleanStar Ventures, understands both the financial opportunity and the social and environmental imperative. CleanStar invests in, builds, and scales triple-bottom-line business models in emerging markets around the world. CleanStar Mozambique, their latest and fastest growing project, was founded to tackle the cookstove problem with a bilateral solution: new clean-burning ethanol stoves and an ethanol processing facility to fuel them.