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Sustainability reporting in tech companies – the hardware vs software divide

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Nature's fragility

Photo credit Koshyk

I wrote (and subsequently updated) a post a few weeks ago reviewing the Sustainability Reports of various companies in the technology space.

I updated the review again this afternoon (see the updated review below) with the 2009 reports from IBM, Adobe and SAS.

Something which struck me previously, and which hasn’t changed with the new rankings, is the yawning chasm in attitudes to sustainability reporting between hardware versus software companies.

Obviously this divide has a lot to do with risk – hardware companies who have significant manufacturing facilities, with massively complex supply chains, often containing toxic substances have far more exposure to risk than software companies.

This is reflected in the table below where eight of the top ten listings are hardware companies.

On the other hand, the bottom of the table is all software companies (with the exception of Apple – because they refuse to produce a sustainability report!).

The real odd one out though is the leader, SAP. Their sustainability reporting is out on its own. It is way ahead of any other organisation I have come across and this despite the fact that they are a software company!

One factor may be that they have a significantly European representation in senior management – they have a very different thought process when it comes to sustainability. SAP say they want to be an exemplar and an enabler – and, so far, they seem to be delivering on that.

None of the other software companies seem to take sustainability reporting anywhere nearly as seriously as the hardware companies.

Why do you think that is?

[table id=11 /]

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Where is Adobe’s commitment to Sustainability?

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Adobe

Photo credit midiman

I was extremely lucky to be given a tour of Adobe’s triple platinum LEED certified HQ in Palo Alto last year. I video’d highlights of the tour and posted them here. At the time I was extremely impressed with Adobe’s sustainability initiatives.

However, since then I have been more and more wondering if the building is a one-off and if Adobe has any significant commitment to Sustainability.

Why do I say this?

  1. Adobe’s 2009 CSR report, while slightly better than its 2008 report, it is still a triumph of style over content. There is no adherence to GRI reporting standards, no external audit and no mention of targets set or previous targets reached
  2. No-where on the Adobe site or in its CSR reports (that I could find) does it mention who in the organisation has responsibility for Sustainability. If no-one has overall responsibility for it, then we shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t get done
  3. Adobe’s LiveCycle Enterprise Suite gets a passing mention in the 2009 CSR report when it says

    The United States Government Printing Office used Adobe? LiveCycle? and Adobe Acrobat? to generate, authenticate, and disseminate documents electronically, saving more than 20 tons of paper and $1 million over five years.

    Where are the white papers or case studies to back this up? Surely others are using LiveCycle and also saving paper. Why aren’t we hearing more about them? Similarly for Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro, and

  4. A more trivial example, but as I reported a few weeks back, Adobe charge more for downloadable, soft copies of their software, than they do for physical shipped product (which includes carbon associated with media, packaging and transportation)! This wouldn’t be allowed to happen in a company with any focus whatsoever on Sustainability. Software companies should be actively pushing customers to downloadable versions of their products

So, if a company of Adobe’s size and success can get away with such a passing regard for sustainability – are companies who take corporate responsibility seriously like SAP, BT and IBM wasting their time and energy?

You should follow me on twitter here.

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Friday Green Numbers round-up 06/25/2010

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Green numbers

Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

And here is this week’s Green numbers:

  • Six Infrastructure Projects to Save 1.3 Billion Gallons of Water in Australia

    Australia is no stranger to tight water supplies, and fortunately that means smart water conservation strategies are being devised all the time. Australia is leading the way in everything from strategies to combat desertification to using renewable energy for desalination plants, and now it is putting that knowledge to work on six new infrastructure projects that can save 1.3 billion gallons of water.

    tags: greennumbers, australia, smart water, water conservation, desalination, renewable energy, desertification

  • Girls now begin puberty aged 9

    GROWING numbers of girls are reaching puberty before the age of 10, raising fears of increased sexual activity among a new generation of children.

    Scientists believe the phenomenon could be linked to obesity or exposure to chemicals in the food chain, and is putting girls at greater long-term risk of breast cancer.

    A study has revealed that breast development in a sample of 1,000 girls started at an average age of 9 years and 10 months ? an entire year earlier than when a similar cohort was examined in 1991.

    tags: greennumbers, girls, puberty, obesity, chemicals, food chain, breast cancer

  • Coal-fired power was the big loser in the economic downturn | Grist

    There’s some interesting new data out on recent shifts in electricity demand and consumption, courtesy of the DOE/EIA.

    In 2008, total U.S. power generation was 4.1 million GWh. In 2009, that fell by 4 percent, to 3.9 million. That’s a 4 percent reduction — clearly the result of the economic slowdown. Nothing surprising there.

    What’s interesting, though, is how generation shifted by fuel type. Over the same year, coal-fired power generation fell by 11 percent, from almost 2 million GWh to just under 1.8 million.

    tags: greennumbers, fuel, type, coal-fired power generation, coal, DOE, EIA, U.S. power generation, electricity demand, electricity consumption

  • New Microsoft App Can Cut PC Power Consumption By 80%

    Just how important is turning off computers at the end of the day in an office building? Very, if a company wants to save big bucks on electricity bills. According to UC San Diego researchers, 50-80% of a modern building’s electricity use goes to IT equipment, particularly desktop computers. A report last year showed that not shutting down PCs equated to $2.8 billion in wasted electricity. Still, many offices don’t encourage their employees to hit shut-down on their PCs for a variety of reasons, including updating software while everyone is out or being able to keep the computer attached to the network so information on the machine can be accessed at any time. However, Microsoft’s new Sleep Proxy system claims it can help cut energy consumption by 60-80%, without getting in the way of office systems.

    tags: greennumbers, IT equipment, electricity use, Sleep Proxy

  • RWE npower: wholesale electricity prices ?must double? to meet UK targets

    At a presentation at the Oxford Energy Futures conference on June 11th, Andy Duff, non-executive chair of RWE npower, made some controversial assertions about the future of electricity in the UK. He focused on three propositions.

    a)????? The UK cannot meet its carbon targets without new nuclear

    b)????? Electricity demand will grow at 1% less than GDP growth

    c)?????? The UK will not have enough electricity capacity by the latter part of this decade unless UK society accepts a doubling of wholesale electricity prices, which is the minimum required to free the capital investment required to 1) meet demand and 2) decarbonise sufficiently fast.

    In summary, we need nuclear and we all need to accept a substantial rise in electricity prices to pay for it.

    tags: Oxford Energy Futures, greennumbers, npower, nuclear, electricity demand

  • 60% of Chinese Consumers Sceptical of Companies’ CSR Communications: Global Poll

    Chinese consumers are becoming as cynical as those in the West about the way companies communicate about their social and environmental performance, according to the latest wave of GlobeScan’s annual global tracking research on public views of corporate social responsibility.\n\nThe study, which interviewed over 30,000 people across 34 countries, finds that while in 2005 more than 80 per cent of Chinese consumers felt that companies communicated ‘honestly and truthfully’ about their social and environmental performance, this has now fallen sharply, with only 40 per cent feeling this way in this year’s study.

    tags: CSR Communications, csr, china, consumers, GlobeScan, greennumbers

  • E-mail from BP engineer called Deepwater Horizon rig a ?nightmare well? six days before explosion

    Today, the chief executives of the five big oil companies ? including BP?s Tony Hayward ? are going to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. According to an e-mail released by that Committee yesterday, a BP drilling engineer warned that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was a ?nightmare well? that had caused the company problems in the past. The e-mail came just six days before the well exploded:

    tags: bp, oilspill, deepwater horizon, Macondo well, Gulf of Mexico, nightmare well, greennumbers

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Global telco’s sustainability reports reviewed

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Nature's fragility

Photo credit WTL photos

When I published my review of tech company sustainability reports a couple of weeks back, it was suggested that I should add in telco’s as well. Instead, for clarity, I decided to publish a separate review of telco sustainability reports here.

[table id=9 /]

Some points to note from the review:

  • BT & Telefonica both produced very good reports (though Telefonica’s was only in Spanish which limits how accessible it is outside of the Spanish-speaking world)
  • T-Mobile were let down by their chairman, Ren? Obermann, whose contribution was a cut & paste of an online interview he did a couple of months back as opposed to a report specific communication. Matters were made worse by the fact that the picture of the chairman in the report shows him with bottled water. In their Sustainability Report!
  • China Mobile produced an excellent report (in Chinese and English) which was let down only by the lack of external audit
  • Telecom Italia’s report was one of the best in terms of data transparency
  • AT&T’s 2008 report is very nicely laid out but it is dated, only to GRI level C and not externally assured
  • Telenor didn’t bother producing a report (that I could find) but they do have a Corporate Responsibility site while
  • 3 (owned by Hutchinson Whampoa) don’t have any Corporate Responsibility site or report that I could find on any of its sites. For shame.

If you have any updates or would like to suggest a company, please feel free to do so in the comments below and I’ll happily update the post.

You should follow me on twitter here.

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Tech company sustainability reports reviewed – Updated

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Corporate Social Responsibility
Original photo by ATIS547

I was asked on Twitter recently where to find a list of links to tech companies’ CSR reports.

I didn’t know where to find one, so I built one and as well as just the links, I also added in a few extra observations I noted about the reports.

[table id=4 /]

As previously reported here, the 2009 SAP Sustainability Report is superb.

Another company in the list worthy of note is BT, whose report, despite the lack of interactivity, is the only other report to hit the GRI A+ rating.

HP’s site has gone heavy on design to the detriment of usability which is unfortunate because some of the content is really good.

After that, almost all of the companies who have a 2009 report published have done a really good job. The exception to this is Microsoft whose 2009 report, while an improvement on previous reports, still has a long way to go to approach a professional CSR Report standard.

Of the companies who have yet to publish their 2009 report, Oracle and Adobe’s 2008 reports are lacklustre attempts, at best. Neither report to GRI standards and both are long on pretty pictures and short on relevant data.

Having said that, at least Oracle and Adobe are producing Sustainability reports.

The three laggards in this list are Google, Amazon and Apple – none of whom are producing sustainability reports at the minute.

In their defence, Google has its Going Green at Google website and Apple has its Apple and the Environment site, both of whom go into considerable detail on each companies initiatives. In Apple’s case, it does go deep into a lot of the data you would normally see in a Sustainability report. Why it refuses to produce a formal report is beyond me.

In contrast, Amazon’s attempt at an Environmental site/page is an embarrassment. If this is the best they can do, honestly, they’d be better off doing nothing.

One issue I noted was that HP, Cisco and Apple [PDF] all report on sourcing 100% renewable power in Ireland. This is not possible for the reasons I outlined in this post.

What other companies should I add to this list? Please feel free to suggest any in the comments and I will update the list.

UPDATES:
Since publishing this, Nokia have brought out their excellent 2009 report and it is now included above.
Also, based on suggestions received on FaceBook I have added details about 3 other companies (NEC, Fujitsu and Indra Sistemas). It was also suggested there that I go over various telco companies CSR reports. I’ll leave that to a separate post.

You should follow me on twitter here.

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Curt Johnson, Chair of Diversey, talks RoI of Sustainability, “CO2 is Waste” and energy savings

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Diversey invited me to attend their Climate Change Summit in Amsterdam earlier this week. I went along and was very pleasantly surprised by Diversey’s commitment to corporate sustainability.

Towards the end of the day I had a chat with Curt Johnson, the Chair of Diversey, about their sustainability initiatives. Some of the highlights of the conversation:

  • Sustainability goes back to Curt’s grandfather leading an expedition into the Amazon in the 1930’s! – 1:00
  • Curt’s father (Sam Johnson) banned CFC’s as propellants from all SC Johnson products before there was any legislative requirement – 1:20
  • A cost/benefit analysis shows that being sustainable produces ROI – 2:40
  • Diversey are tripling their target and now aim to reduce CO2 emissions 25% by 2013 over their 2003 baseline – 3:56
  • Diversey’s experience is that for every $1 invested in emissions reductions, they get $2 back – 4:30
  • Diversey are tripling their target and now aim to reduce CO2 emissions 25% by 2013 over their 2003 baseline – 3:56
  • CO2 is a waste by-product of our operations… if you can reduce CO2 it is inevitable that you will create a more efficient system that is more cost effective – 4:40
  • CO2 is waste, so if you minimise CO2, you minimise waste and you maximise efficiency and increase profits – 6:00
  • Diversey’s sustainability initiatives have a huge influence on employee morale, engagement and retention – 6:31

Some other great tidbits which were left on the cutting room floor were:

  • Diversey participate in the EPA’s SmartWay program to reduce the impact of shipping
  • Diversey intend to be the first company to publish the carbon footprint of all of their products on the products
  • Diversey have converted to a daylight office cleaning regime for a one-off cost of $100,000. This move is now saving Diversey 8% on their annual energy bill and
  • Diversey actively works with their customers to help them to reduce their chemical usage!
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Friday Green Numbers round-up 04/23/2010

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Green numbers

Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

And here is this week’s Green numbers:

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Friday Morning Green Numbers round-up 03/05/2010

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Green numbers

Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

Here is this Friday’s Green Numbers round-up:

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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15 Green Predictions for 2010

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Looking into my crystal ball

Photo credit seanmcgrath

It is the end of the year – that time of year when everyone rolls out their X Predictions for 2010 post and, in that regard, GreenMonk is not going to be any different!

Well , maybe slightly different, some of the following predictions are more like hopes and aspirations on my part than likely outcomes!

  1. There will be an increasing emphasis on sustainability initiatives as organisations understand their financial benefits
  2. CSR reporting will become mandatory for large companies in the EU
  3. Companies will more and more look to IT to help them with their energy efficiency programs
  4. An heightened legislative emphasis on carbon reporting will spur the development of more carbon reporting software
  5. There will be greater and greater integration of carbon reporting functionality into ERP and financial reporting applications
  6. Standards will be agreed for energy and water footprint labels for products and services
  7. Water and energy footprint labels will be made mandatory in the EU
  8. At least one smart grid rollout in the US will fail spectacularly due, in large part, to poor stakeholder communications
  9. More and more Smart City initiatives will come on stream as cities aim to become more sustainable
  10. Mainstream car manufacturers will start to release plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles
  11. At least one major mobile phone handset manufacturer rolls out mobile phones with built-in environmental sensors (for crowd-sourced environmental data viewable in realtime with an Augmented Reality browser)
  12. Bluefin tuna stocks will crash in the atlantic
  13. It will be a record year for ice loss in the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets
  14. It will be a record year for damage from hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific
  15. 2010 will be the warmest year on record due to the combined influence of El Niño and global warming

    16. and a bonus prediction for good luck:

  16. The US will finally pass climate legislation limiting CO2 emissions (but it won’t go far enough!)
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June 1st GreenMonk Energy and Sustainability show

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Had a great show today with plenty of links and feedback from viewers – here is the transcript from the show.

03:31 Tom Raftery: Can anyone see/hear me?
03:31 cgarvey: A/V all good
03:31 mikethebee: Vid and auio ok
03:32 mikethebee: my typing rubbish
03:33 Tom Raftery: http://environment.uk.msn.com/news/headlines/article.aspx?cp-documentid=147696467
03:35 Tom Raftery: http://planetark.org/ark/53151
03:37 Tom Raftery: http://www.coolerado.com/news/
03:38 Tom Raftery: http://redgreenandblue.org/2009/05/26/oil-giant-shell-on-trial-for-nigerian-environmentalist-saro-wiwas-execution/
03:39 Tom Raftery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Saro_Wiwa
03:40 Tom Raftery: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1189929/The-return-flight-bumblebee-creates-buzz.html
03:42 Tom Raftery: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/27622.wss
03:44 Tom Raftery: http://www.apesphere.com/blog/29/2009/05/30/Has_CSR_become_a_code_word_for_profit_trumps_ethics
03:46 Tom Raftery: http://www.newenergyworldnetwork.com/renewable-energy-news/by_technology/energy_efficiency/energy-technologies-institute-develops-uk-energy-system-blueprints-for-2050.html?utm
03:48 Tom Raftery: http://community.nortel.com/go/blogs/greenroots/2009/05/28/guest-post-energy-star-standard-released-for-computer-servers
03:49 Al: Bit of a joke though
03:49 Tom Raftery: http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/coming-soon-a-new-eco-label-for-tvs/
03:51 Al: Energy star rating
03:51 Al: For servers
03:52 Al: The power we consume on our servers is less than the tolerance on their specs
03:52 Tom Raftery: http://www.clearstandards.com/carbontracker.html
03:53 Al: Except in this case our servers would not be
03:54 Al: compliant that is
03:54 Al: They should ahve been much more agressive
03:54 Al: Just like carbon targets
03:55 dahowlett: aaah…stream here as well
03:55 Tom Raftery: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/ariel-schwartz/sustainability/volvo-employees-green-their-commutes-cell-phone-application
03:56 dahowlett: I was over the other place
03:56 dahowlett: yes – I was over on the Ustream thingy
03:56 Tom Raftery: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/real_time_noise_and_air_quality_monitoring_over_mobile_internet.php
03:59 Tom Raftery: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/28/cnnheroes.suzan.lakhan.baptiste/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
04:01 Tom Raftery: http://www.ecofriend.org/entry/eco-tech-scientists-to-recreate-stars-on-earth-for-limitless-energy
04:04 Al: Its the carbon police
04:04 Al: Their coming to get you
04:04 mikethebee: Gr8 feature on BBC R4 Farming today about Thanet Earth. First time I had heard of it. http://www.thanetearth.com/
04:04 dahowlett: the fire is under your desk
04:05 dahowlett: in themeantime…it’s time to go sunbathing
04:05 cgarvey: All good Tom, thanks again for the informative show!
04:05 dahowlett: nice one Tom
04:05 Al: Thanks Tom
04:05 Tom Raftery: Thanks everyone for joining in and contributions
04:05 Tom Raftery: Great show see you all here next week!
04:05 mikethebee: well done again
04:06 Al: Maybe using Google’s wave would be a nice addition
04:06 Tom Raftery: I’d love a Google Wave account
04:06 Tom Raftery: There is only a v limited release of accounts afaik yet
04:07 Al: Maybe you have to attend a European Google I/O
04:07 Tom Raftery: Probably – and can’t make a case for going to it 🙁
04:08 Al: Cheers Tom l8r