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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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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.

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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.