CSR

CSR: Corporate Social Responsibility

From Wikipedia: Corporate social responsibility is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model. CSR policy functions as a built-in, self-regulating mechanism whereby business monitors and ensures its active compliance with the spirit of the law, ethical standards, and international norms. The goal of CSR is to embrace responsibility for the company’s actions and encourage a positive impact through its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere.

Furthermore, CSR-focused businesses would proactively promote the public interest by encouraging community growth and development, and voluntarily eliminating practices that harm the public sphere, regardless of legality. CSR is the deliberate inclusion of public interest into corporate decision-making, that is the core business of the company or firm, and the honouring of a triple bottom line: people, planet, profit.



Kraft Uses Stakeholder Engagement to Achieve Zero Waste in 36 Plants

Achieving zero waste seems to be the biggest goal with many food companies. Coca-Cola has done it. Kit Kat has done it, and now Kraft is following their footsteps. The company recently announced that it sends no waste to landfills in 36 of its manufacturing plants in 13 countries. Kraft has been steadily working towards building [...]

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The Best of Opportunity Green – Sustainability Goes Mainstream

In case you missed one of the top sustainability events of the last year, The Best of Opportunity Green created by the team at Yoxi.tv provides a number of actionable quotes from the thought leaders that attended the conference. Piloted by co-founders Karen Solomon and Mike Flynn, Opportunity Green works to “inspire a collaborative culture of new thinking and unconventional ideas that push [...]

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Where Sustainability Reporting is Headed: An E&Y and GreenBiz Survey

While at the GreenBiz12 Forum in New York earlier this week, I got a sneak preview of the findings of the new Ernst & Young and GreenBiz Group survey of trends in sustainability reporting.

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Ernst & Young to Certify GHG Emissions Reporting

Ernst & Young, one of the Big Four accounting firms, has received approval from ANSI to certify greenhouse gas emissions reporting.

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One More Step And We Get Supply Chain Cake

Apple released details of its supply chain performance, via an extensive “Progress Report.”  Our friends at Supply Chain Matters provided a link to the report, and to a list of all of Apple’s suppliers.

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Kaiser Permanente Greens its Supply Chain by Switching to Safer IV Equipment

Kaiser Permanente announced that it is converting its IV medical equipment to safer alternatives that do not contain PVC (Polyvinyl chloride) and DEHP (di-2-ethyl hexyl phthalate).  Both these chemicals are widely used in plastics but have been shown to harm human and environmental health.

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Leveraging Deficits: How the Best Corporate Citizens Drove Cross-Sector Collaboration During the Great Recession

With a “renaissance” in how companies, NGOs, and governments are collaborating to tackle some of our toughest challenges, this blog post looks in-depth at the specific new models and practices that are emerging in cross-sector collaboration.

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Clif Bar Family Foundation Announces Grant for Organic Plant Breeding

The Clif Bar Company has always integrated CSR into its business model. The company only consists of 250 people, but it operates on a much larger scale in terms of CSR. Many of their ingredients are organically grown and their products do not contain high fructose corn syrup, additives, or hydrogenated oils. To take their food philosophy one [...]

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Deficit-Driven Economic Developments

The recession started a renaissance in how companies, NGOs, & governments collaborate. With governments and non-profits facing yawning budget deficits and business facing one of its biggest trust-deficits in history, organizations are coming together in unprecedented ways to tackle some of society’s greatest challenges. In fact, a distinct set of collaborative practices used by the “best corporate citizens” and their partners have emerged that others could adopt.

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UPS Earns LEED Gold Status for Corporate Offices in Atlanta

Despite UPS headquarters being 20 years old, the company just announced that it has become the first in the package delivery and logistics industry to gain LEED Gold Certification from the US Green Building Council. UPS submitted the building for review in May 2011 (shortly after the appointment of Chief Sustainability Officer Scott Wicker) and [...]

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Beneficial Insectary Commissions GreenVolts Turnkey Concentrated Solar Photovoltaic System

Having recently unveiled its fully integrated, turnkey concentrated photovoltaic energy system, Fremont, California’s GreenVolts announced the commissioning of a fully warrantied 288-kW CPV system that should provide more than 80% of peak electricity needs at Beneficial Insectary’s production facility in the Shasta Valley.

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UK Sandwich Chain Helps Homeless and Ex-Offenders Get a Second Chance

UK sandwich chain Pret a Manger, is a great example of a company that has CSR integrated into its business model. The chain gives away almost two million perishable food items each year that have passed the ‘sell by’ date (but are still safe to eat). In one stroke, they have reduced the amount of [...]

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Google Continues Its Investments in Renewable Energy

Although Google is a tech-company with huge, energy-intensive data-centers, they are also pretty clued in about sustainability. Through the years, they have been investing heavily in renewable energy technology, not only as part of their CSR but also because it makes business sense for them. Last year, they released details about their carbon footprint and their report discussed [...]

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Should Coca-Cola Use its Power to Promote Social Justice in Swaziland?

It’s never dull at Coca-Cola. The company didn’t have much time to recover from its white polar bear can campaign fiasco and the accusations it tried to stop a ban on sales of disposable plastic water bottles in the Grand Canyon National Park before a new crisis arose. This time the negative attention concerns Coca-Cola’s presence in [...]

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Patagonia Founder First in Line to Register as Benefit Corporation

Since the dawn of corporate social responsibility, Patagonia has been it’s pioneer and poster child. The company was founded on the principle that the business’s bottom line was more than just monetary. As early as 1974, founder Yvon Chouinard published an essay in the Patagonia catalog urging climbers to be more conscious of their motives and to [...]

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Motel 6: Sustainability Means We’ll No Longer Leave the Light on For You

Accor, a leading hotel chain that owns a bevy of chains including Motel 6, is ramping up their corporate social responsibility efforts. Employee engagement and water stewardship are among the initiatives.

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Walmart’s Green Room Blog Launches

At long last, Walmart has entered the sustainable blogosphere with a new site called “The Green Room” (not to be confused with our own green room project with BBMG). Walmart’s new offering is a self described “platform for an ongoing conversation with NGOs, suppliers, the media, and others who want to share ideas and partner with us [...]

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The Leftovers of Fast Fashion

The following post is part of the course work for “Live Exchange” the foundational course on communication for The MBA Design Strategy Program at California College of the Arts. The rest of the posts are presented here. By Brandy Davis-Balsamo Wandering through a used clothing store, Jane pushes her way into a rack so tight [...]

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The Culture Shift of 2011, and What It Means for Business (Part 2 of 2)

3p is proud to partner with the Presidio Graduate School’s Managerial Marketing course on a blogging series about “sustainable marketing.” This post is part of that series. To follow along, please click here. By Griff Foxley In part 1 of this post, I explored some of the forces at play today that are creating a [...]

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Was Occupy Wall Street a Tipping Point? What Does it Mean for Your Business in 2012?

3p is proud to partner with the Presidio Graduate School’s Managerial Marketing course on a blogging series about “sustainable marketing.” This post is part of that series. To follow along, please click here. By Griff Foxley On October 26th, a beautiful video was posted on Vimeo of a murmuration of starlings. It was a rare [...]

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Why it’s Time to Stop Accepting Unaudited CSR reports

We are usually very excited to hear about every CSR report that gets released, as we know this is an indication of another company that is moving forward. We read these reports, sometimes raising questions about one point or another and in some cases even criticize companies for missing information. One thing we don’t do [...]

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CSR: Still a Question of Balance and Value

A recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly on the drivers behind corporate responsibility says that few companies are clear on how investing in social initiatives will change stakeholder behavior. The article asserts that few companies understand the harm that a bad CSR strategy can cause. This is a little surprising because the recent conventional wisdom [...]

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The Common Good Enterprise – A New Term for an Emerging Sector

By Jim Epstein and Alicia Epstein Korten As an investment advisor, I (Jim) am often asked to sit on nonprofit boards. I have grown uncomfortable with the term not-for-profit to describe these organizations, which often embrace business principles in their operations. For example, DC Greenworks generates income from government contracts and fees for green roof [...]

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3 Emerging Trends in Employee Engagement

Two years ago, when the concept had just started to really gain traction, we reported the results of a survey conducted by Brighter Planet on engaging employees on sustainability issues. The company just released an update to that study which includes responses from employees at some of the companies leading corporate sustainability efforts including Walmart, UPS, and [...]

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Promoting Sustainability in India

CII-ITC Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development is one of the institutions that promotes sustainability in India. The Centre, which is based out of Delhi enables businesses to become more sustainable. It also offers guidance and resources to nudge Indian industries towards more inclusive growth and sustainable development. The Centre also has formulated the CII-ITC Sustainability Awards to [...]

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Cisco’s New Focus on Conflict Minerals

Cisco is a company that already has a robust CSR program and their focus for 2012 is conflict minerals. This week they released their CSR report for 2011 highlighting some of their achievements and plans for the future. Since the Dodd-Frank act was passed, conflict minerals have become a focus for many electronic companies. Cisco [...]

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Hasbro Pledges to Remove PVC From Its Products

Hasbro was one of the companies to drop Asia Pulp and Paper as their supplier recently. Now with the launch of their first CSR report, they have pledged to remove PVC from all new core toy and game packaging by 2013. PVC causes a lot of health and environmental problems because it contains phthalates as well [...]

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Sustainability – Overused and Undervalued

The following post is part of the course work for “Live Exchange” the foundational course on communication for The MBA Design Strategy Program at California College of the Arts. The rest of the posts are presented here. By Corine Prothero Effective sustainability conversations need to be heard everywhere. Select students, communities, grassroots movements, businesses, and [...]

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Top 12 Predictions for Corporate Responsibility in 2012

13 key predictions for the corporate responsibility market in 2012.

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Is It Time To Ditch the CSR Department?

What is the latest debate in the CSR space? If you think it’s about the business value of CSR, think again. That debate is so 2010. Right now it looks like everyone is debating a totally different question – should companies ditch their CSR departments? Last week this debate was intensified when Keith Weed, Unilever chief [...]

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