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Chris Milton

Chris Milton

Nine website metrics for zero landfill waste | Part 1 of 2

The car industry is caught between a rock and the proverbial hard place.

Petrol is now seen as horrible and polluting … not only is it responsible for pumping ever more carbon dioxide, the world’s top cause of global warming, into the air but the particulate emissions are being linked to everything from asthma to cancer and are making cities progressively unhealthy.

Of course you can go electric, but that’s not much better.  There is a growing body of evidence that the manufacture of electric cars is more environmentally damaging than petrol, and no-one’s yet figured out how to dispose of the toxic lithium batteries e-vehicles rely upon.

However there are some things the car industry’s doing right, and one of those is waste.

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New angles on responsible CSR communication

Ages ago I bookmarked an article on the Ibero-American CSR Blog about how the media engage with CSR.

The guts of the article come from the book La Responsabilidad Social en América Latina (Social Responsibility in Latin America) by Mercedes Korin, founder of the Argentinian firm Mapeo de Promotores de RSE.

In the book Mercedes highlights how the media tend to be uncritical in their coverage of CSR, celebrating practices which are responsible and sustainable and tending to ignore those which are irresponsible and unsustainable.

There’s a very close relationship between PR and the media and while all journalists will tell you they report fact fairly and without bias, the reality is that much of the business news agenda is driven by companies seeking to portray themselves in the best possible light.

So yes the media probably should be more critical of business activities, but a business should also be more self critical … more aware of how its policies and procedures affect its staff and stakeholders and how analytical it is being of its own behaviour.

In order to encourage this kind of analysis within the the media, Mercedes suggests four areas which should be addressed and they form the basis for the four angles I mention below.

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Shining transparency into CSR websites


Think of elves … what do you get?

Happy chappies I’ll bet, full of light and song and laughter.  That’s the legacy of Victorian Romantics for you.

In reality their folklore tradition is more complicated.  Often seen as the root of minor ailments, elves were sometimes portrayed as having more malign intentions.

Even in modern literature, the great elf-lord of them all J.R.R Tolkien (not Timothy McGee) made sure there was at least one pure-evil elf in his Middle Earth cycle, Maeglin.

The reason for this odd intro is because this illusion/reality concept reminds me of Canada.

Canada?  Yes, Canada.

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How to do CSR in just 10 days

Recently British Gas (BG) were round at my house.  We had a problem with the boiler and .. well, after three visits they still didn’t fix it.

In the course of all this we had a new carbon monoxide alarm fitted, which BG helpfully charged £29.95 for.  Somehow we forgot to pay this so a few weeks later a letter from Moon Beever arrived.

This isn’t a strange version of an Andy Williams song but a long established firm of solicitors in Central London which specialises in litigation and debt recovery.

On the left hand column of their website there is a permanent section entitled “Community Services” under which is the logo for Macmillan Cancer Support.  “Oooh,” I thought. “Interesting!”  So I clicked on it .. and it took me to the Macmillan Cancer Support website.  Not so interesting.

There’s nothing exciting about Moon Beever’s association with Macmillan and I suspect it’s more about donating to a friend’s legacy (Debbie’s Fund) rather than corporate responsibility.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure the firm are acting will all best intentions and they should be applauded for the terrific fund-raising they’ve done.

However there must be many SME businesses out there who want to “do something” in CSR but think it’s horribly complicated or painful. I’ve come across a very simple way you can fulfil your CSR ambitions in only 10 days.  And here it is….

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New Green Marketing Guidelines – A Guide

Two years ago the Danish government published a set of guidelines on green advertising claims.  It said

Environmental or ethical claims in marketing should .. be correct and precise and exaggerations as to the company’s or the product’s ethical qualities or positive effects should be prohibited

Now the US too has issued tighter guidelines.

This month the Federal Trade Commission reissued its Green Guides for the first time since 1998.  These lay out the standards expected to be followed by advertisers in the US and go into far greater depth than the Danish guidelines.

Furthermore websites are mentioned specifically in a number of places in the guidelines as examples, so it is clear that these guidelines apply to online marketing as well as any other form.

Businesses from other countries therefore need to be acutely aware that their websites may fall foul of these much tighter guidelines, especially if they’re targeting the US market.

So without further ado, here’s a brief run down of the new rules:

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Ten Principles for a New Economy 1/3

One of the wonderful things about the new networked globalised economy is how you suddenly discover the links which exist between one business and another.  This can have both productive and detrimental effects on a business, depending upon your point of view.

For example, take Apple’s highly publicised involvement with Foxconn.  The good side is that Foxconn allows Apple (and other tech manufacturers) to access the cheap Chinese technology manufacturing market.  The bad side is that there has been a spate of suicides by Foxconn workers which, whether relevant or not, will stick to Apple as a negative influence upon their brand.

Another “wonderful thing” is finding out the different aspects of a corporation when you’ve only known one. Take, for example, the New Economy Network (NEN).

NEN was founded by the Tellus Institute in 2010.  It comes from the same stable as the Global Reporting Institute (GRI), which is now a de facto sustainability reporting tool amongst businesses.

However, whilst many companies may support the GRI reporting regime I suspect few would put their wholehearted weight behind NEN’s Principles for a New Economy (PDF).  Why?  Because, like any Tellus Institute initiative they cut against the establishment’s grain.  To understand this more fully, let’s look at the principles in more detail:

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