2Sustain

Late last month, UPS released the latest edition of its annual sustainability report, and once again, the company has managed to reduce the amount of fuel it’s using to deliver each package in the United States.

Interestingly, the company’s US package volume rose 1.8 percent in 2010 compared to 2009, and yet UPS reduced the amount of fuel consumed per package by 3.3 percent. The company attributed the improvement to:

• deploying the right vehicle on the right routes,
• using technology to minimize the miles driven and
• focusing on how behavior can affect fuel use.

All told, technology has enabled UPS to avoid driving more than 63.5 million miles in 2010 with an associated emissions avoidance of 68,000 metric tonnes. As remarkable as it sounds, UPS estimates that distance is the equivalent of 251,987 trips to the International Space Station.

How, exactly, has the company used technology to reduce fuel consumption? According to a press release, UPS has specifically improved: (more…)

Best Buy has released its sixth corporate responsibility report, which not only reveals the company’s performance highlights for fiscal year 2011, but also outlines several ambitious goals for the future.

For example, going forward, Best Buy is committed to:

• recycling one billion pounds of consumer goods and

• reducing its carbon footprint by 20 percent by 2020, regardless of how much the company grows.

In addition to these goals, Best Buy’s new CSR report discloses that, specifically with regard to environmental stewardship, the company already has: (more…)

Earlier this month, Consolidated (Con) Edison issued its 2010 Sustainability Report, detailing its long-term business strategy, an approach that relies on energy efficiency, renewable energy and recycling.

Con Edison is a New York-based utility that employs 15,000 employees, has $13 billion in revenues and holds $36 billion in assets. The company provides nine million people with electricity while balancing sustainability principles based on six fundamental points:

• Insist on green behavior from employees.
• Encourage green behavior to external stakeholders.
• Meet customers’ demands for a greener lifestyle through innovation.
• Partner with governments to create policies that match Con Edison’s sustainability vision.
• Develop an infrastructure for renewable energy.
• Include environmental and social values within its decision making process.

What are the results so far?

(more…)

Late last month, Northern Trust released its first Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report, offering a detailed review of the company’s CSR strategy and an overview of global initiatives launched or completed last year.

Northern Trust, a 120-year-old company with $93 billion in banking assets and $4.4 trillion in assets under custody, made considerable accomplishments in community work, philanthropy, and environmental protection in 2010. For example:
(more…)

Consumers are increasingly focused on corporations’ sustainability practices. But, how well do public perceptions align with firms’ actual performance on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues?

New research suggests that there isn’t much alignment, at all, and that, unfortunately, many companies are facing reputational risk if they don’t better coordinate their branding, communications, reporting and stakeholder engagement processes around emerging ESG priorities.

The new study, Sustainability Research Report: Measuring Perception vs. Reality, provides a quantitative analysis of sustainability and corporate citizenship performance of 100 leading multinationals.

Conducted by the brand consulting firm Brandlogic and CRD Analytics, the study surveyed 2400 supply chain managers, investment professionals and graduating college students from the US and abroad about their perceptions of the multinationals’ ESG efforts. Then, researchers compared those perceptions against the performance data from 175 performance metrics and five key ESG performance indicators.

Data from the study showed that: (more…)