The sweet notion that making a company environmentally friendly can be not just cost-effective but profitable is going up in smoke.
...With rising consumer anxiety over global warming, businesses want to show that they're part of the solution, says Chris Hunter, a former energy manager at Johnson & Johnson (JNJ ) who works for the environmental consulting firm GreenOrder "Ten years ago, companies would call up and say I need a digital strategy.' Now, it's I need a green strategy.'"
Environmental stewardship has become a centerpiece of corporate image-crafting. General Electric (GE ) says it is spending nearly all of its multimillion-dollar corporate advertising budget on "Ecomagination," its collection of environmentally friendly products, even though they make up only 8% of the conglomerate's sales. Yahoo! (YHOO ) and Google (GOOG ) have proclaimed that by 2008 their offices and computer centers will become "carbon neutral." Fueling the public relations frenzy is the notion that preserving the climate is better than cost-effective. But Schendler, who only a few years ago considered himself a leading proponent of this theory, now offers a searing refutation of the belief that green corporate practices beget green of the pecuniary variety.
Much corporate environmentalism boils down to misleading statistics and hype. To make real progress, genuine accomplishments will have to be sorted out from feel-good gestures. Schendler no longer views business as capable of the dramatic change he thought possible eight years ago, the sort of change that corporations have grown accustomed to boasting about. His own employer is "a perfect example of why this won't work," he says. "We've had a chance to cherry-pick 50 projects and get them done. But even if every ski company could do what we did, we'd still be nowhere."
Read full in businessweek here
Environmental stewardship has become a centerpiece of corporate image-crafting. General Electric (GE ) says it is spending nearly all of its multimillion-dollar corporate advertising budget on "Ecomagination," its collection of environmentally friendly products, even though they make up only 8% of the conglomerate's sales. Yahoo! (YHOO ) and Google (GOOG ) have proclaimed that by 2008 their offices and computer centers will become "carbon neutral." Fueling the public relations frenzy is the notion that preserving the climate is better than cost-effective. But Schendler, who only a few years ago considered himself a leading proponent of this theory, now offers a searing refutation of the belief that green corporate practices beget green of the pecuniary variety.
Much corporate environmentalism boils down to misleading statistics and hype. To make real progress, genuine accomplishments will have to be sorted out from feel-good gestures. Schendler no longer views business as capable of the dramatic change he thought possible eight years ago, the sort of change that corporations have grown accustomed to boasting about. His own employer is "a perfect example of why this won't work," he says. "We've had a chance to cherry-pick 50 projects and get them done. But even if every ski company could do what we did, we'd still be nowhere."
Read full in businessweek here
