2Sustain

Yesterday, the Clorox Company launched a new CSR website devoted entirely to increasing communication about the company’s CSR initiatives.

These CSR initiatives fall into five broad categories, defined by Clorox as:

• People: treating employees and partners with dignity and respect

• Products: delivering safe, high-quality products that meet consumer need

• Performance: running business operations responsibly and ethically while targeting strong financial results

• Planet: decreasing the company’s environmental impact

• Purpose: supporting the communities where Clorox does business

The Web site includes an upgraded product ingredient listing that features more than 230 household and commercial cleaning, disinfecting and auto care products in the U.S. and Canada –plus, there’s a comprehensive glossary of terms for each ingredient, as well. Clorox hopes this product/ingredient index will help consumers understand the function of each product ingredient.

“Doing the right thing for our people and our communities has always been part of our DNA,” says Clorox Chairman and CEO Don Knauss. “In this age of transparency, we recognize how important it is for us to tell our story. We also want to be more responsive in addressing immediate consumer needs, which is why we upgraded our Ingredients Inside program. This is just one example of how Clorox is committed to earning people’s trust every day.”

The Clorox Company is a leading manufacturer and marketer of a wide array of consumer products –ranging from bleach and cleaning products to Hidden Valley salad dressing, Glad trash bags, and Burt’s Bees natural personal care products (to name just a few)—and it’s great to see a global corporation like this take a leadership role across a broad spectrum of CSR issues. I particularly liked spending a few minutes on the company’s “planet” pages, where I learned that :

• Clorox has made a commitment to reduce its global water use, energy use and GHG emissions by 10 percent and its solid waste by 20 percent by 2013 (versus 2007 base year).
• During the past five years, Clorox has made sustainability improvements to 32 percent of its product portfolio on a volume sold basis and has plans in place to make sustainability improvements to 25 percent of our portfolio by 2013.  90 percent of the company’s product cartons use 100 percent recycled material, and more than 85 percent of the packages that house Clorox products are recyclable.