CorpComms Magazine

Five years ago, communicating the importance of sustainability initiatives on corporate agenda was about explaining what this awkward six syllable word actually meant.

Now, the task involves battling climate change fatigue, and providing a constant commentary as inevitable blows, blips and backlashes occur in the progress of what has become a movement.

Note the additions to the environmental lexicon in recent years. From 'greenwash' to 'post-Copenhagen blues' and 'Climategate', communicating sustainability is far from a soft backwater.

Furthermore, some significant challenges lie ahead, with the renaissance of nuclear energy, the need for major renewable energy investments and the plans to bury carbon dioxide under the sea all highly controversial areas that will need first-class campaigning and communications skills.

However, whilst these battles are getting under way, experts say that companies and industry sectors in the vanguard of the sustainability efforts are quietly getting on with taking their action to the next stage.

Take Britain's retailers. Marks & Spencer has recently added another 80 commitments to the 100 that it launched under its 'Plan A' ecological and ethical programme in 2007, and has set out a pledge to be the world's most sustainable retailer by 2015.

The company says it will now ensure that all its 2.7 billion individual food, clothing and home items across 36,000 product lines will become 'Plan A products' with at least one sustainable quality, help its 2,000 suppliers to adopt best sustainability practice and to encourage customers to live greener lifestyles.

It is not alone. Supermarket chain Sainsbury's, whose active sustainability programme has already involved cutting its packaging waste and switching banana suppliers to Fair Trade sources, is now planning to generate energy from its food and packaging waste to heat customers' homes.

The retailer has formed a partnership with Imperial College in London that is committed to delivering innovative and practical solutions to lower its carbon footprint and develop new green technology.

Sir Brian Hoskins, head of the climate change programme at Imperial College, told The Guardian that Sainsbury's programme was significant enough to make it the 'low-carbon centre of the community'.

Tesco, meanwhile, has said that it aims to 'create a mass movement in green consumption'. The company now ranks its communities alongside the four other elements on its 'corporate steering wheel' - staff, customers, operations and finances.

Good for business?

So why are Britain's retailers investing so much time and money in becoming sustainable? Does it really make a difference to their bottom lines? Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury's and Tesco all say that they embrace sustainable practices not purely from an ideological point of view but because they are good for business.

Yet, 'Managing for Sustainability,' a recent Economist Intelligence Unit report, found that just 24 per cent of 200 senior executives surveyed thought there was a strong link between financial performance and commitment to sustainability in the short-term.

The proportion rose to 69 per cent when a five to ten year timespan was considered, but ten years is long enough for many companies to have three different chief executives - which hardly gives incumbents the incentive to invest in such programmes.

Despite this, the companies themselves seem strongly committed. Daniel Himsworth, corporate public relations manager at Marks & Spencer says: 'Sustainability is very important for us. We have always said it is the right thing to do for shareholders, for customers and for society.

'We extended Plan A because it was the right thing to do environmentally and socially and it has been good for us as a business.

'When we launched Plan A in 2007, we said we were prepared to invest £200 million over five years in the plan. We found that by year two it was cost neutral and by year three it became cost-positive, so investments we make as part of Plan A are more than outweighed by savings in things like reduced energy usage and fewer road miles. In year three of Plan A, that has resulted in a £50 million saving.'

Similarly, Justin King, chief executive of Sainsbury's has said that he believes that the most sustainable decisions are profit-enhancing in the long-run. After research among its customers, the company came up with its top seven sustainability issues - packaging, waste, sourcing, Britishness, employees, animal welfare and suppliers. Its publicly stated ambition is to lead on all seven.

Solitaire Townsend, co-founder of sustainable communications agency Futerra, says that retailers have reached what she calls the third stage of company progression after making commitments to act on sustainability and corporate and social responsibility programmes several years ago.

The journey to sustainability

The first stage is the schoolboy phase where companies embrace sustainability initiatives because they feel that they ought to or face regulatory pressure to do so, she says.

In this phase, she says, there's a lot of fervour and box-ticking. It's also where easy cost-savings are made because companies are cutting waste and saving on power bills.

Next is the graduate phase where enthusiasm for sustainability programmes goes up the food chain of organisations, sometimes because there has been a sudden crisis.

Organisations form corporate responsibility; companies can become extremely distracted by processes such as having to compile an annual CSR report and there is a danger that it is not part of the core business, she says.

The third stage, however, is the professional phase, where Townsend says sustainability becomes embedded in organisations as they seek to make themselves fit for purpose and build solid reputations as corporate citizens, throwing up exciting growth opportunities as innovations are developed and customer and clients are attracted by their sustainability credentials.

'A lot of retailers have made it to the professional phase and are now at the stage where they are seeing opportunities for growth,' she says. 'I can't see any supermarket group allowing themselves to slip back from this phase. That would be the height of foolishness.

'They're competing with each other on this now, not just on traditional product lines. It's no longer about Marks & Spencer versus Waitrose. It's M&S versus Sainsbury's and Tesco in terms of what they're doing about the sustainability challenge.'

With planning permission for stores increasingly difficult to obtain and supermarkets having to tackle supply constraints in food as the world's population increases, she argues that sustainability has become a key part of retailers' licences to operate in communities.

And she believes that pressure from customers, who will increasingly view action on sustainability as an important differentiator between supermarket chains, will lead retailers to continue to enhance their sustainability credentials.

Plans for the future

There are still lots of actions on sustainability that food retailers have yet to take. Simon Heppner, acting managing director of The Sustainable Restaurants Association, which has been established by London-based responsible business consultancy Good Business to promote good practice in dining outlets, points out that the cafes and restaurants of supermarket groups are often excluded from sustainability initiatives.

'Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury's have 400 cafes and it is pretty strange that customers who go to these stores for their sustainability credentials find that they cannot make sustainable choices when they eat and drink in these restaurants,' he says.

'The big retailers are definitely starting to look at this now and we are talking to them about getting some of their cafes accredited.'

At the World Wildlife Fund, head of UK business and industry communications Dax Lovegrove believes much more needs to be done, saying the recession has had an effect in stemming some companies' actions on sustainability.

He states: 'I think that in some sectors we're seeing a turning down on sustainability, but there's some good progress in the food and beverage sectors.

'A lot of these companies are really starting to understand that there's a lack of water resources and of course food crop production is a major user of water so they're starting to look further down the supply chain to find sources that are sustainable.'

If sustainability really is good for business as well as for the planet, however, some of these initiatives will need to start providing decent financial returns.

Claire Green, managing director at Good Business, says: 'At the moment, there is value being created but, like a lot of other variables, it's hard to measure. But I think that, within five to ten years, retailers will see the benefits of their actions on sustainability, relative to those of their competitors.'

share me: del.icio.us | digg | reddit | Tweet