Greenmonk: the blog

Dell is now rolling out a new waste disposal services for SMBs, including free curbside pickup.

I have a feeling the service is only available in the US for now, which is a shame. But well done Dell.

Programmable Web writes up the open source, open data AMEE carbon calculator.

I recently covered freecycle… a service to help people offload useful stuff to each other when they don’t want it anymore. Now comes news that Islington Council is recycling the freecycle approach, with its own SwapXhange, which appears to be going really well.

So far over 17,000 people have visited the Islington Swapxchange website and you have swapped over 16 tonnes of items . This is the equivalent of 354 fridge freezers, 785 televisions, 1040 lawnmowers or 114 pianos!

Well done posh Islingtonites!

photocredit - EVERYDAYLIFEMODERN

In other good local news, a case-study driven report from the Society of IT Management (Socitm) urges local authority IT departments to take action to make their operations more environmentally friendly. See the Computerworld story here.

Another cool Computerworld story is this story on employee-owned retailer John Lewis, a cool interview with Gary Hird, technical infrastructure manager. Two points to note.

One: employee ownership means that “gimmicks” to make people, say, turn off the lights, are more effective. Signs don’t say “turn off the lights, its green”…. they say “Switch off – it’s eating my bonus”.

Two: maybe mainframes aren’t so bad after all. I loved this throwaway line:

An audit of server usage revealed a low 8% utilisation. “Our mainframe has nearly 100% utilisation,” points outs Hird. “Clearly, the Intel servers could do better.”

The solution- implement VMware.

When I first heard about BadBuster a lightbulb went off (energy-saving of course). Sustainability rating in real time, something like the way FT.com now turns every company name into an AJAX-based live share price widget… but in this case with an ethical dimension.

The idea behind BadBuster is that when you come across a brand or company name on the web the BadBuster widget aggegates data from a number of other systems, such as the Carbon Disclosure Project, Calvert Online and ClimateCounts. BadBuster condenses the numbers from those sources into a single score for each company. The tragic thing about BadBuster is that’s its IE only, as Read/Write Web points out in its review. Hopefully that will change in the short term. I might well start using it then, but for now its just something interesting. Better informed web surfers has to be a good thing. It looks like this:

I saw a tweet from @derekabdinor the other day that intrigued me, so I went to check out the Jungle Rating site. The consultancy has just published ratings which aim for a view of how firms included on the DJSI STOXX Dow Jones sustainability index perform in online sustainability reporting. The idea is to create a benchmark consisting of 125 research criteria.

The outright winner was BASF.

BASF publishes topical information (news and case study updates) and offers complete GRI-based performance information, very useful for the professional user groups (socially responsible investors and analysts).

The website also contains several unique features, such as case study videos, flash animations, downloadable Excel sheets and interactive graphs.”

interactivity, programmability, and more open data. Makes sense.

The next companies on the list were BHP Billiton, Centrica, Novo Nordisk & BP.

Gas and utility companies-the usual regulated industry suspects for CSR PR. I need to spend some time checking out the DJSI SToXX index. I must admit I was pretty surprised not to see BT on list, given that its a European company I rate highly on sustainability action and reporting.

Meanwhile seeing BP on the list also made me think-not because of its sustainability reporting capabilities, but simply because I think BP talks the talk, but doesn’t walk it. The Lord Brown era was an era of deceit: all mouth and very short trousers from a sustainability perspective. Beyond Petroleum- yeah, right. Tell it to Alaska or Texas.  Lauding BP for its online carbon calculator seems a bit pointless. After all-there are already a surfeit of such calculators out there. Carbon calculators are table stakes not differentiators.

I spent yesterday in Berlin with Transparency International, which got me thinking about the difference between PR and a real commitment to sustainability.

The ticklist means nothing. Videos and “web 2.0′ features can obscure, rather than enable, transparency. Peter Wilkinson, a consultant working with TI, told me a brilliant story over dinner about a famous London lawyer who, having been refused permissionto build a garage extension to his house, spent time poring over the relevant statutes, and then went ahead with his new garage anyway. It turned out that as long as the structure had doors on all four sides planning permission was not actually required. Of course if you opened any of the doors on three sides of the building all you found behind them were brick walls. If that isn’t a brilliant metaphor for tick-list corporate social responsibility (CSR) I don’t know what is. All the reports and funky web sites in the world won’t create a real commitment to sustainability.

Or will they? Its kind of hard not to “inhale” when you’re smoking CSR dope. Much as with open source there is a disruption associated with adopting new approaches.

I would like to see an index correlating true CSR responsibility with best in class reporting. Perhaps a future version of XBRL can help with that…True benchmarking. But in the shorter term it seems Jungle has a point. The transition from CSR brochureware to interactive read/write CSR platforms mirrors the transition we’ve seen on the web. With full awareness of the potential danger of using the term I am tempted to tag the new approach CSR 2.0.

I am not the only one thinking this way.

The web offers a chance to put the social in corporate social responsibility. 

Geert Jan Grimberg, internet consultant at Jungle Rating, says:

“the best performers provide complete and topical information, but also make use of the unique possibilities the web offers in terms of multimedia (e.g. video, rich internet) and personalisation (e.g. interactive graphs, downloadable Excel sheets)”. Very few companies use their corporate website to facilitate a stakeholder dialogue, by means of a weblog or periodical chat sessions.”

Dialogue, markets as conversations. Jungle makes some forecasts based on its research:

1. Disclosing topicalities, statements and opinions: Companies use their corporate website more and more to inform stakeholders on topical matters both within their company and in the broader environment (industry / politics).
2. Creation of an online stakeholder experience: The last years, wave riders have started to experiment with the use of multimedia (images, video and rich internet) on their corporate website and within the sustainability section.
3. Taking into account individual stakeholder preferences: many techniques are available to personalise information for specific needs, some front runners for example offer alert functionalities, interactive charts and/or podcasts (downloadable audio files) within their online sustainability section.
4. Establishing an online stakeholder dialogue: Although by far omnipresent yet, some companies start to make use of the various possibilities the internet offers to get a discussion with stakeholders going (e.g. chat, weblog, polls).

All good motherhood and apple crumble. For me its all about point 4, the conversations between corporations and multiple stakeholders. The fact only 17 out of the 53 firms studied were willing to discuss their efforts with Jungle indicates we have a long way to go. Real leaders are building structures with doors and windows, that allow stakeholders through the corporate membrane.

Thanks to SideLong for the use of the photo above.

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