A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
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Something, definitely, is in the air. “Business Lobbies for Emission Restrictions” was the front-page story in the March 20 US edition of the Financial Times. Companies such as DuPont, BP America, and Alcoa, along with leading investors, have urged Washington to follow Europe’s lead and set mandatory targets to cut carbon emissions, noted the newspaper.
Just a couple of months earlier, BusinessWeek had devoted its cover story to corporations that embrace the concept of sustainability. “A remarkable number of CEOs have begun to commit themselves to . . . sustainability goals, even in profit-obsessed America,” wrote Pete Engardio in the January 29 issue. “There’s a sophisticated understanding that environmental and social practices can yield strategic advantages in an interconnected world of shifting customer loyalties and regulatory regimes.”
Doing good, from a corporation’s point of view, has traditionally been defined as maximizing value for its shareholders. Then along came the notion of corporate social responsibility. It was seen by much of the business world as utopian, at best. Many dismissed it as merely a fifth column with an antibusiness agenda at its core. Over time, the concept was grudgingly accepted by some companies, not always for the purest of motives, but it was rarely actively embraced. Until now. Growing awareness of the threat of global warming compounded by a lack of leadership on this issue from the US government may have been the tipping point.
The BusinessWeek article cited how Unilever is helping emerging economies to develop without neglecting its duty to wrestle for market share. The company funds a floating hospital that offers free medical care in Bangladesh. In São Paulo, it operates a free community laundry and helps tomato growers set up eco-friendly drip irrigation systems. And the firm is committed to transparency: it reports how much carbon dioxide and hazardous waste its factories produce. Why? For Unilever CEO Patrick Cescau, the calculus is easy: Approximately 40% of the company’s sales, and most of its growth, take place in developing nations. Helping these countries cope is vital to staying competitive in coming decades, Cescau is quoted as saying.
In a sidebar, BusinessWeek named a handful of companies, by industry, that are “doing well by doing good.” Among medical technology firms, it cited Fresenius Medical Care (Bad Homburg, Germany) as a model to follow.
Fresenius discloses the cost of patient treatments using its products in terms of energy and water use and the amount of waste that is generated. The firm has folded ISO 9001:2000 and environmental standard ISO 14001 into a business process. Fresenius applied this “integrated management system” to a dialysis clinic in Portugal. The resulting ecological ranking provides data that the company uses in a comparative manner to set new, presumably lower, targets going forward.
Fresenius also has successfully reduced its carbon footprint by analyzing its logistics processes and eliminating wasteful practices. Expanding direct shipments, when feasible, allowed the company to eliminate the unnecessary transportation of goods between suppliers and joint venture partners. The company also developed a container recycling programme that is in constant expansion. It now includes disposables that are used in dialysis clinics in Germany and infusion products.
I’m sure many of you reading this column work for med-tech companies that have reduced their environmental impact. I would love to hear about it, and, perhaps, tell our readers how your company has balanced the imperatives of market share with sharing the planet.
