Sustainable Avon - lipstick by lipstick

Avon (the company for women) is rather a special business with quite a unique business model. Stop to consider the scale of Avon. It has 6.5 million Sales Representatives, selling $10.5 billion in cosmetics to over 300 million customers in over 100 countries. That's some network. The Sales Reps are mainly women who use the Avon earnings opportunity to help support themselves and their families, using $1 billion in credit, making Avon the world's largest microlender and promoter of women's economic independence. These Sales Representatives are the powerhouse of the Avon sustainability efforts, bringing the message directly to consumers, a challenge so many consumer-facing companies constantly struggle with. A staunch supporter of women's issues, Avon has leveraged this  massive network to drive a highly visible and successful Crusade against Breast Cancer which has reached over 105 million women since 1992, and the Speak Out Against Domestic Violence campaign launched in 2004 in support of the billion women worldwide who are victims of such violence. Avon likes to take on big issues that limit the sustainability potential of our society in a big way and make a big difference. The Company has an impressive track record, which leaves me in no doubt that the current cause that Avon has taken upon itself to advance will achieve the same degree of enhancing awareness, driving sustainable behaviors and contributing to a more sustainable world.

The Next Big Thing for Avon is the company's focus on ending deforestation.  I was fortunate enough to be able to have a chat with Tod Arbogast, Avon's VP for Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility, one of the most passionate people I have spoken with in a while, who describes himself as "amazingly optimistic and inspired by Avon Sales Representatives". Tod joined Avon in 2009, into a newly created role, after many years of sustainability related work including VP for Sustainability at Dell, and took on board the crafting and implementation of Avon's Hello Green Tomorrow program, designed to mobilize a global environmental movement to nurture nature and restore critically endangered rainforests in South America and Indonesia. See this page for many compelling reasons for this to be an important flagship program for Avon and for all of us.  The reforestation work will be carried out by Avon's partners at the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund with monies raised through Avon efforts worldwide. How will the money be raised? Partially through the sales of the Hello Green Tomorrow Reusable Water Bottle - 100% of net profits will be contributed to the reforestation program. 2011 is the second year of the program, and Tod told me: In 2010 we raised a total of $2.1 million. With over 50 countries participating we hope to match the 2011 number, and are doing our best to support all the Avon teams worldwide in their fundraising efforts. We are actively promoting the program to our Avon Sales Representatives, both to support fundraising as well as to drive education on the "5 Rs": reduce, reuse, recycle, rethink, replant. Through research, outreach and events over the past 3 years, we know that Avon associates and Sales Representatives are passionate about environmental stewardship. They want Avon to take a leadership position and serve as a change agent, as we have done for breast cancer and domestic violence, and they want a way to get involved and make a difference in environmental issues. The Hello Green Tomorrow program provides all of this." 

The other significant aspect of nurturing nature in the Avon program is the Palm Oil Promise. Palm oil is a common ingredient in many products, including cosmetics such as lipsticks, soaps and shampoos. Palm oil plantations have had a great impact on the destruction of tropical forests and peatlands, especially in Southeast Asia. Avon has joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) to help continue the development, implementation and verification of credible global standards for sustainable palm oil and recently announced its commitment to purchase GreenPalm certificates covering all of Avon's global palm oil use which will help drive demand for sustainable palm oil, increase the supply for sustainable palm oil and maintain biodiversity and habitats for endangered species. GreenPalm is a certificate trading program endorsed by the RSPO. Avon claims to be the FIRST beauty company to commit to 100% sustainable Palm Oil. Tod Arbogast of Avon explained that this is groundbreaking because the Avon commitment is effective "right now" and not in 2012, or 2015, or 2020 which is how most companies frame their goals, and also the commitment includes all Palm Oil derivatives as well as Palm Oil as a single product. Also, the significance of Avon's commitment is in its potential to drive awareness and change behaviors and influence global practice. Tod explained: "Overall, 45 million tons of Palm Oil are produced each year, and 17 million tons of Palm Kernel Oil. Avon's total consumption of Palm Oil and derivatives is very small by comparison. Our biggest impact is awareness. The Palm Oil Promise also helps us to work more closely with our raw material suppliers - by committing to 100% sustainable Palm Oil and derivatives sourcing, we must have a robust method to account for the amounts we, and our suppliers, are using. This also serves as a tool to improve our management of the entire program and we are working with partners to put this in place. Despite costs involved for Avon, we do not expect this to result in a higher price for consumers".

I asked Tod about Avon's packaging policy and here again, I found Tod enthusiastic and clearly focused in his explanations. " Our packaging approach is three-fold: (1) minimizing the amount of packaging we use relative to product (in terms of weight) (2) increasing the use of sustainable materials in packaging and (3) driving awareness for end-of-life solutions for packaging. Actually, I believe Avon has one of the most efficient packaging to product ratios in the industry. This is because of the unique nature of our business model. Our products do not need to carry their marketing messages on their packaging to stand out on a retail shelf. When we sell a lipstick, it's a shrinkwrapped tube. Competitive products often have 2 or 3 additional layers of additional packaging. We continue to work to improve our sustainable packaging performance in all three focus areas."

Finally, everyone knows that I cannot have a conversation about sustainability without talking about reporting. Avon's last report was published in 2009 and the 2010 report will be published later this year. That's certainly a report which I will be intrigued to read. Watch this space!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/productdetail.kmod?productid=3282 Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz/en (BeyondBusiness, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

Praise for sustainable packaging: HP

My kids had been wanting a printer (for absolutely essential and non-negotiable-needs-to-be-printed homework for educational purposes only) so I invested in a small HP deskjet printer. I was pleasantly surprised on unpacking the box to see the ecologically conscious and creative way the printer was packaged. The printer was NOT packed in big blocks of environmentally-yucky expanded polystyrene as shown in the pic below:

Insteead, HP now pack using  board made from post consumer recycled waste and industrial paper waste and place the printer itself in a reusable shopping bag. See pics below:

See what HP say about packaging in their 2009 sustainability report and the reductions of packaging levels per product. Not only did I gain a printer, I also gained a bag for my shopping to add to my weekly shop collection, and I have less stuff the throw into my garbage. 

Well done to HP! Thanks for being environmentally conscious and helping me to be too!  

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz/en  (BeyondBusiness, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

Adobe. Packaging. Green. Fail.

The WAIP (Wasteful and Irresponsible Packaging) Award this week goes to ..........

ADOBE SYSTEMS.

I decided to invest (having moved to a new laptop and upgraded all my other hardware and software), in the new Adobe Acrobat X, which has several improvements over previous versions. I took delivery of the product today, and love the new program! BUT.. the pagkaging really turned me off. This is how Adobe Acrobat X is packaged:

And this is the product that all this lavish cartonboard, lamination, gloss and ink actually houses:

Aside from the wasteful packaging, just think of all that extra air that is being transported all over the world in this box, and all the extra weight that requires all that extra energy to move around.  And the extra cost to me, the consumer, for all of this cost the company is incurring. In a company with an embedded sustainability culture, this wouldn't happen.

Adobe claim to be environmentally conscious and environmentally responsible.Their 2009 CSR summary report proudly notes that Adobe was recognized by Newsweek as one of the 20 greenest companies in the world (This was in 2009. Actually, they ranked #7 in 2010) . Adobe writes "we highly encourage and promote conscientious environmental stewardship among our employees and our business partners." The summary report doesn't refer specifically to packaging, and I couldn't find anything on packaging initiatives on the  Adobe CSR website.  

All in all, a major FAIL for ADOBE in packaging sustainability.
 

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz/en  (BeyondBusiness, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

What a waste!

Every so often, I come across absolutely wasteful packaging. Here is another example from my own market. I challenge you to find similar examples from your market.

The product is an aluminium can of the most basic brand of instant coffee you can buy in Israel, on offer with a bar of chocolate with hazelnuts. The offer is the two products packaged together, presumably at a discounted price (I didn't compare prices). Here is how it looks:

See all that cardboard ? What a waste? Consider the design costs, printing costs and inks, the additional bulk in shipment of this product, the pallets, the handling, the additional space on  the supermarket shelf.  I would even go as far as to suggest that by taking all that extra cost out of the supply chain, they could probably give two bars of chocolate away for free. How will the consumer dispose of that corrugated cardboard ? Straight to the household garbage bin, and off to landfill with the weekly garbage collection. How much extra cost is in that process given the hundreds of thousands of units this manufacturer will sell, I assume? How many unnessary tons of waste ? I am not an engineer, nor a marketeer, but it  bothers me when I see such uncalled for waste in our system. Climate change or otherwise, it's just thoughtless abuse of our environment.

I am sure the Company involved is not intentionally behaving irresponsibly. In fact, this company, the Strauss Group, is one of the leading and most respectable Israeli-based global food Companies, practising corporate social responsibility, accountability and transparency. The Company has issued two high-quality Sustainability Reports and is a model for our market. The Packaging Development Manager quoted in the 2008 report , Environment Section,  states that impact on the environment is a "paramount value and critical factor" in their approach to design. So, what went wrong ?

Once again, I point to the massive challenge of truly embedding sustainability in the business, and ensuring all employees are active in influencing process for improved sustainability, however small they may be, at every stage in every process. How come it takes me, albeit an aware and conscious consumer, to notice this? How come the hundreds of employees involved in the design, manufacture, delivery and shipping of this product don't come up with a more environmentally friendly alternative, before it hits the shelves ? Someone within the system needs to speak up. Instead, in examples like these, we can only assume silent complicity or total lack of awareness on the part of everyone who designs, authorizes, handles and delivers this product. 

The coffee and the chocolate are great, by the way. :)

elaine cohen is the CEO of Beyond Business, a leading social and environmental consulting and reporting firm. Visit our website at www.b-yond.biz/en

Inform, inspire and involve to embed CSR in operations

Embedding, post number 4. We already covered embedding CSR in Human Resources, the Procurement function, and the Finance function. All of this, as you may recall, is based on Ethical Corporation's 2009 research report called How to Embed Corporate Responsibility across different parts of your Company. This time, i will cover the ways Companies embed CSR in the "Facility, Logistics and Operations" bits of the Company. Having managed logistics for many years with Procter and Gamble in Europe, this is an area of the business I am familiar with. The report looks at:

• How to make facility or manufacturing operations more efficient and more  environmentally friendly through consultation with operators and line workers
• Developing low energy or socially innovative solutions for triple bottom line benefit
• Indentifying no-cost innovation solutions
• Developing partnerships to drive suggestions for improvements

Most people will understand quite easily that environmental opportunities are abundant in the Manufacturing and Logistics functions. With examples from Boots, Hewlett Packard, Novo Nordisk and Vodafone, the report cites examples of innovative solutions in different aspects of the supply chain which offer benefits for customers and the business, and which have been developed using insights and suggestions of those involved on the ground. Opportunities such as haulage partnerships with non-competitive companies to optimize truck payloads, recycling and re-use rather than disposal of products, real-time energy monitoring  are some of the solutions highlighted. The key common demoninator of the development of these solutions is : dialogue. Creating a culture where employees of the business, suppliers and customers can contribute to developing triple bottom line solutions is core.

Developing new ways of doing things, and maintaining a constructive dialogue with suppliers, customers and employees does not happen automatically. A company looking for CSR opportunities in the manufacturing and logistics functions needs to define its objectives and create awareness for the concepts of social and environmentally preferred ways of manufacturing or trucking. This means creating  communications processes for all these stakeholders, so that CSR is part of their mindset when they are reviewing operational activities. "Greening employees" for example, reflects the process of educating, informing, involving and inspiring  employees regarding environmentally friendly practices.

What better Company to use for a review of the embedding of CSR in the logistics function than a logistics Company. I took a look at Fedex 2008 CSR report. Here is an example:

"At the FedEx Packaging Lab, our engineers use the latest materials and tools to solve shipping challenges, including environmental ones. FedEx engineer Yongquan Zhou recently helped a customer shipping heavy exercise equipment from China find a more protective and environmentally friendly alternative for a commonly used cushioning material known as expanded polystyrene foam (EPS). His result: a honeycomb-style packaging with corrugated pads and banding, a packaging solution that not only reduces damage at a comparable cost, but is also better for the environment."

I assume Mr Zhou didn't wake up one morning out of the blue and thought to himself over the morning cornfakes: "Hmm, I need to find environmentally friendly packaging solutions today". I bet he didn't say to himself " Wow. Honeycomb-style packaging, gotta do something with that". I bet he didn't think, as he helped himself to a third bowl of cornflakes,   "I can contribute to saving the planet today by developing environmentally-friendly solutions for Fedex clients". Maybe he did, but the chances are that if he did, it was because of a culture that had been developed at Fedex to ensure employees are aware of their possibilities to contribute to environmental efforts, and provide them with the opportunity to do so.

You can't embed CSR if you don't inform, inspire and  involve.
 
elaine cohen is the joint CEO of BeyondBusiness, a leading reporting and social-environmental consulting firm . Visit our website at: www.b-yond.biz/en

When CSR reporting is a waste of paper

CSR reports, aka Sustainability Reports, are supposed to be sustainable, right? That means no printed copies, right ? Wrong. Sustainability reports are business documents, and, like any other important business document,  it is ok to print them but. Print them but. This means that, as with any aspect of CSR and sustainability, we must exercise restraint and consideration of all stakeholders in how we do what we do. So in printing CSR reports, I might expect a Company to consider:

• Printing on recycled paper or environmentally friendly paper (see previous post on paper made from all-sorts-of-animal-excrement).
• Printing a short summary with the bulk of the report online(see Nexxar for best CSR online reporting).
• Printing a small number of copies for those who really want or should read the report.

I confess. I like to see something in print. Gives me a feel for the Company. Allows me carry reports around and read them when i can. (Ask my hub about how many reports i take to bed with me!!) (well, on second thoughts, don't ask him). Perhaps this is hypocritical ? A sustainability consultant who likes to read printed reports? Perhaps but.

The but is that what really REALLY annoys me is unconsidered wasteful ways of sending CSR reports through the mail. I have mentioned this before in a different previous post, and now i will mention it again. (consistency is a virtue)

The following picture is of 9 one-side-printed separate pieces of paper that accompanied the delivery of the 2009 CR Report from .. and this time i will name names ... Deutsche Telekom. Delivered by DHL which is a Deutche Post Company.

Here's that consistency thing again: 9 separate one-side-printed pieces of paper. Why would you need 9 pieces of paper to go with the delivery of one slim report?

Deutsche Telekom's 2009 CSR report is  online and a 68 page PDF download. It is a well written report at GRI-checked  A+ reporting level. This is what DT have to say about saving paper:

(page 41) "Thanks to innovations such as “Paper, Pen & Phone,” customers can significantly reduce their own paper consumption and the resulting environmental pollution. The special pen developed by T-Systems records all the special characteristics of a signature via an integrated camera, thereby enabling digital identification and processing of documents signed by hand. Compared to the former archiving process, paper consumption is thus reduced by up to 50 percent, and costs are reduced by as much as around 70 percent. In order to exploit this savings potential in our own Group as well, we have launched “Paper, Pen & Phone” in around 800 Telekom Shops in Germany since February 2009."

And more (page46 ) "We succeeded in winning over almost one third of T-Home customers for our online billing. This helps us and our customers in contributing to environment protection by reducing paper consumption by over 1,500 tons".

But what about shipping CSR reports? What super innovations have been developed to ensure that paper consumption is reduced in this process?

Which brings me to another point: INDIRECT REPONSIBILITY .

It is possible that Deutche Telekom have no idea that DHL uses 9 separate one-side-printed pieces of paper for each report they deliver. Maybe this is standard DHL procedure. The kind of standard procedure that no-one ever thinks to question because that's just the way its done. But doesn't Deutsche Telekom have an indirect reponsibility for the actions of their suppliers engaged in providing products or services on their behalf?

Actually, in the DHL (Deutche Post AG)  2009 self-declared B+ report I couldn't find anything relating to paper consumption reduction, only references to sustainable paper sourcing. I couldn't find a figure for how many tons of paper consumption DHL or Deutsche Post have reduced in the reporting period. Maybe that's because they havent. However, a target area for Deutsche Post is " Mobilizing our employees: Raising awareness of climate protection and broader environmental issues, and enabling our employees to minimize our company’s environmental impact through their everyday actions." Like shipping CSR reports.

So who should we take issue with here ?

(1) DHL for using 9 pieces of paper

(2) Deutsche Telekom for letting them

(3) Me, for wanting to read the printed report in the first place ?  (hint: dont pick this option)

But the point of this post is that : i would expect that people in a company where CSR is truly embedded at all levels of the organization would pick this up.  I believe that employees at all levels  should recognize  environmental waste in  the system, assuming they had been made aware of its importance to the Company. 

These day-to-day almost-unnoticed actions can  be very important. They can also point to the degree to which each employee in any business takes personal responsibility for all aspects of the Company's CSR behaviour.

elaine cohen is the joint CEO of BeyondBusiness, a leading reporting and social-environmental consulting firm . Visit our website at: www.b-yond.biz/en