Though typically viewed as more of an opponent to environmental causes, corporations and businesses can play an important role in achieving green goals.
Typically, environmentalists consider corporations to be an opponent — more of an obstacle to their ultimate goals than anything remotely helpful, more destructive than green. Glancing through the website of an environmental NGO, such as Food & Water Watch, provides a good example of the rhetoric and ideas that often typify the environmentalist perspective on corporations. They control our food system, our water, even our democracy. They pollute the earth and sky without consideration of the long-term impacts of their actions.
Those views are well-founded, as corporations have been at the heart of many destructive activities and continue to be. Even corporations whose leaders ostensibly view sustainability as a priority still continue business as usual, resulting in environmental disasters but apparently no lessons learned. Even after mishaps such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, fundamental business practices of the industries responsible did not change. Corporations failed to do the right thing in those cases and in the past, and it appears that they will continue to fail in the future.
Still, corporations appear to be at least interested in the idea of sustainability if nothing else, and some have been very active in their efforts to minimize their impacts and incorporate ethical business practices. Many large corporations have come together under the Corporate Eco Forum to commit to incorporating sustainability into their business. The member list includes some big names such as Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Unilever.
Some corporations also may opt to become certified benefit corporations, a legal status conferred by 31 states. Benefit corporations, in addition to pursuing profit, are legally obligated to consider the needs of both society and the environment. For those businesses, sustainability must not only be an outgrowth of their operations, as is sometimes the case, but an integral part of it. B Lab also offers certification to interested corporations in every state that pledge to incorporate sustainability. The non-profit inspects them and ensures that they are compliant with the requirements for certification. If they are, they become certified “B-Corporations.” Here in Athens, we have a branch of a B-Corporation located on West Union — Third Sun Solar.
There are many avenues a concerned corporation can pursue in order to incorporate sustainability into its practices, and as a result corporate sustainability is growing. Though obstacles such as a consumer culture more concerned with price than ethics, the emphasis on short-term rather than long-term gains, and the ambiguous definition of corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility all hindering the growth of corporate sustainability, it appears corporations still will have their function in a sustainable landscape. Perhaps, then, we should consider corporations as less of an obstacle or an opponent and more of a tool.
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Austin Miles is a senior studying biology. What do you know about corporate sustainability? Email him at am343011@ohio.edu.
