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.



Video Interview: Where Does My Stuff Come From?

In this interview, Sourcemap founder Leonardo Bonanni shares his quest to shed light on supply chains and to make them more sustainable.

Read On »

5 Reasons Why Apple’s CSR Strategy Doesn’t Work

Last week in a very interesting article on HBR Blog, Prof. Gregory Unruh of Harvard offered the explanation that Apple has a reactive CSR strategy, which he described as the “Little Dutch Boy” Strategy. In other words, Apple bothers to act only when there’s a complaint or protest against the company, hoping like the little Dutch boy that poking its fingers in the holes in a dyke will stem the flow and let the company go back to concentrate on designing and selling great products. While Prof. Unruh is certainly right about Apple’s reactive strategy, I believe the CSR problems of Apple go beyond its reactive strategy. Looking at the main issues Apple has been struggling with in the last couple of years, I identified 5 main problems that cause Apple to fail time and again when it comes to CSR

Read On »

Managing Your Employee Volunteer Programs: 9 Steps to Success

Volunteer engagements enable your employees to go out in the community, represent your brand, build relationships, and strengthen communities by sharing their skills and passions. Particularly in these difficult times, where the news is dominated by troubling stories, there is perhaps no better way to enhance your image and stand out from the pack than by sharing uplifting stories that demonstrate your company’s social responsibility.

Read On »

Saudi Arabia Plans $109 Billion Solar Future

Saudi Arabia will seek investors interested in a $109 billion plan to generate power from solar energy. The ambitious plan calls for a long term goal of generating an entire third of the nation’s electricity from solar power by the year 2032.

Read On »

The Truth Will Out: Mainstream Media is Starting to Notice

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 [...]

Read On »

Bike Culture at Levis: Built to Last

Bike commuter culture at Levi Strauss & Co. started small and is now an integrated part of the company’s culture.

Read On »

Safeway, Whole Foods Top Greenpeace Seafood Ratings

Safeway and Whole Foods tops the list of Greenpeace’s rating of sustainable seafood retailers.

Read On »

Interview: Beth Holzman of Timberland Talks CSR

Following the release of Timberland’s 2011 CSR report, Beth Holzman, Senior Manager of CSR Strategy and Reporting at Timberland talks about the achievements as well as the challenges the company is facing. Can Timberland meet its bold 2015 CSR goals? Does it continue to show real progress and demonstrate a high level of transparency, even after the purchase by VF? Check the interview out.

Read On »

Lockheed Ahead of Go Green Commitments

Lockheed Martin met or exceeded its five-year sustainability goals in 2011.

Read On »

Green Data Centers: Is It Worth Running a “Losing” Race?

Explosive growth in mobile computing and cloud services has industry players, public and private sector organizations focused on greening the data center. But with investments and data center facilities growing exponentially, it’s more than likely that electricity demand will far outstrip energy savings and renewable energy gains.

Read On »

Bottoms Up for Sustainable Tequila Production

How one company is working to make this crucial margarita ingredient more sustainable.

Read On »

L’Oréal’s “Reconstructed Biologic Tissue” May Make Animal Testing Obsolete

Last week L’Oréal released its sustainable development report and shared its progress from sustainability innovation to stakeholder engagement.

Read On »

Can Shareholder Activism Spur Electric Utilities to Shift Away from Coal?

Some of the largest US electric utilities in the use are facing shareholder proxy votes calling on them to enact and report on coal risk mitigation plans. Behind the proxy resolutions is CSR/shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, which asserts that shareholders face significantly increased investment risk as a result of the utilities’ reticence to enact such plans and shift away from coal to other cleaner and renewable energy supply sources.

Read On »

Interview: Lee Broughton, Enterprise Holdings

At this week’s Fortune Brainstorm Green conference, I also had a few minutes to talk with Enterprise Holdings’ Head of Sustainability, Lee Broughton. Lee and I talked specifically about the Electrification Coalition, a membership organization whose goal is promoting policies and actions that facilitate the deployment of electric vehicles on a mass scale. Given that [...]

Read On »

Interview: Scott Wicker, Chief Sustainability Officer, UPS

At this week’s Fortune Brainstorm Green conference, I had a chance to talk briefly with UPS’ Chief Sustainability Officer, Scott Wicker. Readers of TriplePundit know there’s a lot to say about sustainability at UPS. From innovative fleet decisions to their new LEED gold campus in Atlanta. Scott and I chatted about what the role of [...]

Read On »

Kraft Foods Reduces Packaging and Travel Miles

Kraft Foods recently announced they have cut 45 million pounds of weight from the packaging of their products since 2010. According to their report entitled Creating a More Delicious World, in the last year the company also increased its amount of sustainable agricultural commodities by 36 percent. These have third party verification or certifications. They have [...]

Read On »

Shell Touts Communities, Environment in Recent Sustainability Report

Can an energy company like Shell lead on environmental issues, community building and climate change? Read Shell’s 2011 sustainability report and decide for yourself.

Read On »

Surveys Indicate CSR As a Profession is Still in an Early Stage

Professionals interested in a sustainability or CSR-focused career will feel motivated or cautious based on the findings of two reports released the past week.

Read On »

Launch: Beyond Waste Innovation Challenge

Launch is a one-of-a-kind public-private partnership between NASA, USAID, US State Department, and Nike to use the “power of prizes” to encourage startups to develop an innovative solution that addresses the needs of the developing world. Next up: waste issues.

Read On »

Johnson Controls Touts Environmental Leadership, Green Design in 2011

Johnson Controls, a $40 billion company with 162,000 employees across the globe, builds on its CSR track record with the release of its 2011 Business and Sustainability Report.

Read On »

Top Eleven Takeaways from WSJ’s Conference on Business and Sustainability

The top eleven remarkable moments at the Wall Street Journal’s Eco:nomics Conference

Read On »

As You Sow on Creating Greener Solar PV Panels

Surveying solar PV manufacturers around the world, a non-proift, in conultation with a wide range of experts, establishes environmental, health & safety, and business management best practices for the industry sector while at the same time criticizing current energy policies which favor production of fossil fuels.

Read On »

Harley-Davidson Embraces Sustainability, but Will Its Customers?

As Harley-Davidson begins to ramp up their sustainability initiatives, it’s unclear how the company will balance the masculine, rebel-like nature of the brand with the pressure to adopt a more conscious, caring approach to conducting business.

Read On »

Adidas, Early Member of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, Drops from “Most Ethical” Companies List

The research-based Ethisphere Institute, an international think-tank working to advance best practices in business ethics, CSR, and sustainability recently released its rankings of the World’s Most Ethical Companies. Ethisphere provides third-party verifications of compliance and ethical cultures programs by companies. That puts it in a unique position to give an insiders perspective on corporate behavior. [...]

Read On »

Beyond SOPA: Obama’s Privacy Bill of Rights

The White House is addressing online privacy issues through a consumer privacy bill of rights.

Read On »

US Patent Office Launches “Patents for Humanity” Challenge

Last month at the White House’s Science, Technology, and Innovation Summit for Global Development, UnderSecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property David Kappos launched a novel program created by the USPTO called the Patents for Humanity Challenge.

Read On »

SXSW Interview: Dale Hart of Methodologie

Dale Hart spearheads brand, design, and CSR initiatives at Methodologie- a marketing strategy firm specializing in the creation of brand design systems and corporate social responsibility communications. Methodologie is also a leading firm in the production of creative CSR reports. Dale was a member of the panel I moderated on using technology to “communicate corporate good“.

Read On »

Four Emerging Trends in Corporate Social Responsibility

New Media and CSR: Communicating Corporate Good, moderated by TriplePundit’s very own Nick Aster, identified four major emerging trends in Corporate Social Responsibility in a free-wheeling discussion between Chris Miller, Christine Diamente, Mitch Baranowski, and Dale Hart. What were they? Read on.

Read On »

Can “Green Gamification” Save the World?

Green gamification — using games to engage stakeholders and solve intractable problems — are all the rage. In Gaming the Environment for Positive Change, we learn more about the UVA Bay Game, and other creative approaches.

Read On »

CSR Data Tied to Better Scores

A new study by the BrownFlynn team sheds light on the effects of A-level GRI reporting.

Read On »