Worrying headline on this months ENDS Report: apparently chemical companies are backing off their former approach of publishing annual environmental and sustainability reports. Only a minority of UK companies in the Chemical Industries Association (CIA) Responsible Care programme now do so, preferring to present reports as an industry as a whole. The stats are:

- 60% have no report since 2005
- 60% of those that do report do so at their parent company level
- 17% do not have an environmental policy on their website

I was quite shocked by this. When I got into this game over a decade ago, Responsible Care was held up as the great eco-saviour of the chemicals industry. Transparency and stakeholder engagement were the watchwords of the day but now that seems to have fallen by the wayside. I can only assume that the companies are now a little red-faced about what progress they have or haven't made.

Labels: chemicals, corporate social responsibility, reporting

I'm writing this on a three and a half year old Mac PowerBook. Us Mac users are notoriously sanctimonious and, often, downright snooty when it comes to our IT, so it came as a bit of a shock when Greenpeace launched a campaign against Apple for coming bottom in their scorecard of electronics companies for the second year running (see graphic).


Apple's brilliant, but notoriously brittle, CEO Steve Jobs reacted dismissively to the campaign at first, but something must have sunk in as he has now launched an impassioned defence of Apple's record, trailed on the front page of their website last month. The most significant part is a pledge to phase out some of the more controversial chemicals in its product range, such as Brominated Fire Retardants (BFRs) and Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), by 2008 - other computer manufactures have pledged to phase them out by 2009.

So I can go back to being smug about my Mac...

Labels: apple, chemicals, IT, toxic