Sustainability labels should focus more on actual company performance

When we talk about the “eco-label model” we’re really talking about a combination of three things.

First, standards – a set of requirements, usually taking a consensus-based approach. Second, certifications – providing assurance of conformity against this standard. And, third, the eco-labels themselves – on-pack marks that indicate conformance with the standard.

This model came into being over…

1. Transitions

In a year that saw an Arab Spring take hold and unseat entrenched autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (TBD on Yemen and Syria), the withdrawal of the last American troops from Iraq, a European Union on the brink of transformative change (and potential collapse), a titan of technological (and economic) innovation pass away, and the growing acknowledgement (in the form of the Occupy protests), that the entanglement of the American political and financial system is a Faustian bargain that must be actively fought and protested against, the theme of transition feels all too apt.

So too in the sustainability field, where in a world of seven billion inhabitants and growing, the five most urgent issues on the sustainability agenda are all perceived less urgently than they were in 2009.

I was in Austin last week for a Sustainable Life Media (SLM) double-header. First a meeting of the Sustainable Brands Advisory Board, then the SLM Corporate Members meeting.

Hosted with aplomb by Dell, sessions included a tour of the Dell Social Media Command Center (a fascinating, real-time window into what everyone, everywhere is saying about their Dell experience), and an inspiring visit to the new LEED Gold certified offices of Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG Foundation, with both proving there is more going on in Austin than music, football and great Tex-Mex like Guero’s (though those are fine too, with Guero’s servings proving again that everything is bigger in Texas).

For everything packed into the two days, I left thinking about a presentation by Simon Mainwaring, the best-selling author of We First …

Fast-moving industries involved in the production of consumer goods, food, apparel and precious stones have all come under pressure about the provenance of materials, components and products in their supply chains. Many companies in these sectors have responded by developing mechanisms to assure customers and consumers that products can be traced and sourced with environmental and social considerations in mind. Such traceability has reshaped expectations of corporate accountability and transparency.

Attention is now turning to oil and gas. The sector is already facing a reputational crisis following the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the WikiLeaks disclosures and recent events around the Keystone XL oil pipeline and controversy in the UK over the European fuel quality regulation means that it is likely inevitable that there will be growing demand for greater transparency. As in other sectors, traceability will be a key feature of the rising tide…

Sustainable consumption has been high on our agenda in recent months. Most recently, our latest report Signed, Sealed… Delivered? highlights the diminishing returns from sustainability labels and calls for sustainability to be ‘built-in’ rather than ‘bolt-on’ (or, in this case, labelled-on) to consumer brands.

So with my antennae sensitised for unsustainable consumption, I was stunned to flick through the Financial Times‘ Weekend magazine Christmas Unwrapped and read endless exhortation of excessive consumption…

SustainAbility’s recent paper – Signed, Sealed…Delivered? – provides thoughtful insight and constructive recommendations on ways to make large scale shifts to new models of production, which will result in more sustainable and socially beneficial conditions.

My work is centered on linking market demands with improved raw material production through complex commodity supply chains and business realities. I believe that we must account for the true cost of a sustainability or ethical system and maximize…

As SustainAbility’s new report, Signed, Sealed… Delivered?, explains, certification marks can help build trust in brands and influence consumer behaviour. But they are not universally successful, for all people, in all circumstances. What alternative approaches can be usefully employed? Business in the Community’s Simon Lee explains the findings from their recent report, Influencing Consumer Behaviour – A Guide for Sustainable Marketing.

Why aren’t people acting?

Trust marks undeniably provide a quick, easy method to communicate a company or product’s sustainability credentials to consumers. Yet…

Labelling has an important role to play in conveying information about sustainability to consumers, but it is by no means a panacea for all the ills of unsustainable consumption. Consumer awareness does not simply equate to consumer action; it must be accompanied by incentives, disincentives and, crucially, the phasing out of products and services that have the greatest impact.

This logic does not only apply to the issue of sustainability. Research consistently points to the need for multi-pronged approaches to changing consumer behaviour in areas such as nutrition, financial services, and pharmaceuticals, to name but a few. All the evidence suggests that point-of-sale information alone is not enough change consumer behaviour.

SustainAbility is thrilled to be on the cusp of launching our latest research report, Signed, Sealed…Delivered? In addition to the global public release online and in print November 16th, we will host in-person launch events in Washington, DC and London on November 16th and 18th, respectively, where our findings will be debated and dissected in workshop format with representatives from certification and labeling initiatives, engaged businesses and other stakeholders.

On October 31st the UN proclaimed that Earth’s seven-billionth inhabitant had arrived. Over eight million babies have been born since I wrote my previous blog on consumption. The figures are staggering. However, we know that the threat to the planet has less to do with the absolute number than with what, how and how much we consume. The challenge of how we meet the nutrition, health, shelter, apparel, energy, and entertainment needs of the next billion without further eroding the planet’s finite resources is surely among the most significant of our time.

In my last blog on consumption, I highlighted four trends…

I’ve just returned from a visit to Philadelphia and New York last week where I had the opportunity for in-depth conversation with students and faculty at Wharton Graduate School of Business, as well as business and thought leaders from Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, SAP, Unilever, Interbrand, Ogilvy, GRI, Corporate Responsibility, SustainAbility, The Economist and many others. All of these conversations touched on how we are unfolding our thinking about, and finding ways to measure, new forms of value that business might deliver to its customers and other stakeholders in the future. Underpinning these rich and varied conversations was the growing drumbeat, launched in New York, of #occupywallstreet. This growing movement is yet another indicator of the pressure on business to demonstrate its ability to extend its focus beyond profit to other forms of value creation for broader swaths of society.

The fact that the focus of #occupywallstreet seems to center on “corporate greed” as the target of its aggregated angst is just one sign of disconnect between business and the stakeholders to whom business is supposed to be delivering value.

“We’re here to put a dent in the universe.” Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs has passed away at the age of 56, having transformed the way we use and think about technology. Those of us working toward a more sustainable world would be wise to pay attention to how he did it.

I was working in the mobile phone industry in January 2007, when Jobs stood up on stage and revealed the iPhone to the world. Many of my colleagues looked on unimpressed – sure it looked good, but it was too expensive, too big, too slow for internet browsing, too hard to type on… in fact too just-about-everything. The consensus seemed to be that Jobs, as an ‘outsider,’ just couldn’t understand the complexities of the mobile landscape we all inhabited. What my colleagues missed was that Jobs wasn’t looking to find his own place in that landscape; he was planning to terraform it. And terraform it he did. Five short years ago very few people outside the industry had ever heard the term “smartphone,” but now it seems that every other handset you see is either an iPhone or an imitation of it.

What does all this mean for the business of sustainability? Well, Apple may not be known as a leader on environmental or social issues, but its winning formula serves as a great model for those who aspire to be. Jobs built an organisation that actively sought to shatter the status quo in every market it entered. The iPhone is just one of a number of successess – Macintosh, iTunes, iPad, and so on – that prove how a single company can really change the game if it thinks differently.

A global culture of consumerism has firmly taken hold – the average British woman buys half her body weight in clothing every year; a typical American purchases more stuff every day than an average American weighs; more than 30 million tons of food was dumped in landfills in the US in 2009; and the largest shopping centre in Europe has just opened as the gateway to the London 2012 Olympics. Yet as resources become more constrained, economies stall and businesses begin to think more innovatively about different ways of delivering value to the customer, there are some signals of hope for a reversal in the way that consumers value and use products and services.

Last week we heard Clive Bloom – Emeritus Professor of English and American Studies at Middlesex University and author of Violent London: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts – _commenting on BBC Radio 4 about the systemic issues that underpinned the devastating riots in London this month. With many now searching for an explanation of the sudden and surprising violence that spread across London and other parts of the UK, Bloom argues that sociological factors – chiefly endemic poverty and the alienation of consumer culture – are the real culprits, and further, that failing to address the fundamental issues and resentments of the communities that spawned the riots will only guarantee their repetition. The point is essential as we face the likelihood of wider and more frequent social disruption in response to economic, social and environmental stresses in the decades ahead.

On the heels of the launch of Appetite for Change, our team has spotted a number of developments and received interest in working together to transform our food system. And the overall theme of access to good food remains in the limelight, most recently with…

In the first in a series of blogs on economic growth, Kyra Choucroun set out the problems of an economy predicated on infinite economic growth. Here, guest author Ramon Arratia, Sustainability Director at InterfaceFLOR, sets out his vision for how we can begin to challenge established assumptions by decoupling economic growth from environmental impact. (Note: A version of this piece first appeared on InterfaceFLOR’s Cut the Fluff blog in June 2011.)

Recently I participated in a very interesting Guardian Sustainable Business debate on decoupling economic growth from environmental impact…

With the backing of First Lady Michelle Obama and her campaign to end childhood obesity, Walmart announced a plan to open up to 300 new stores over the next five years in U.S. “food deserts”, wisely aligning its company’s growth plans with the high-profile, publicly-backed initiative. The company, which has reported falling same store sales in each of the past eight quarters, sees urban markets as a critical growth opportunity, and its push into food deserts is an important arrow in its quiver against recalcitrant community members that see only negatives in Walmart’s entry.

The Lancet recently published a major international study revealing that 347 million adults worldwide suffered from diabetes in 2008 – a number that has doubled since 1980 and exceeds that shown in previous studies. As it was a scientific study, it doesn’t address the staggering economic implications of this number in terms of lost productivity and exorbitant healthcare costs for treatment and support. However, a study also published in June in Value in Health contends that nearly one in five people with diabetes are regularly unable to attend a full day at work due to disruption caused by episodes of dangerously low blood sugar. And one in every ten healthcare dollars in the US is spent on diabetes and its complications.

A particular remark has been ringing in my ears for two weeks: “We have an economy where we steal from the future, sell it in the present, and call it GDP.” Those are the words of Paul Hawken, who, in my opinion, has come up with the most accurate definition of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) so far.

When I heard it at TEDxOxbridge, I thought: Bingo! We’re finally weaving growth into the debate, and acknowledging that our obsession with stellar GDP and economic growth is simply an “intergenerational Ponzi scheme” biding its time.

I don’t know about you, but the closest I ever got to a Rubik’s Cube, shortly after it was first launched in 1974, was to handle one in a toy store. For me, it seemed insoluble – and many assumed it was, until persistent cubers discovered not just one way to crack the puzzle, but many. And the cube came to mind as I thought recently about the astonishingly complex global security challenge we now face…