With the festive period firmly behind us, early January saw the KPMG CSR team promoting the recycling of Christmas cards around the firm. The main challenges of encouraging people to support this initiative lie in timely communication and finding original ways of illustrating the message around the volume of waste that can be saved. Innovative comparisons this year included the illustration that 5,800 cards weigh the same as an average reindeer – 87.5 kilos!
January has also seen the first planning session of our activities for this year’s ‘make a difference day’. So far, businesses across nine countries have agreed to work together on this project. Although this initiative doesn’t happen until October, the activities actually take place for a fortnight (despite the name) so if we don’t start working on it now, we will never be able to deliver such a project. Early planning is imperative given the number of cities involved and there is much organisation needed to link up community groups with the various businesses. Even agreeing simple issues such as the themes and how best to evaluate the success of the initiative can be very time consuming when undertaken on such a scale.
Fair Trade Fortnight in March provides us with the opportunity for some internal communications reminding our people that all the tea and coffee in their meetings is fair trade, as well as many of products in the canteen and our house wines as well. There used to be continued debate about the quality of fair trade; the perception was that we would be sacrificing quality and paying more for the privilege. Now these goods are much more mainstream. The range of products is continually expanding, as are the number of local authorities who have become ‘fair-trade boroughs’ and quality is not an issue. Hosting a blind tasting of tea, coffee and wine for people internally helped us to overcome these preconceptions.
Another current issue for us is the firm re-tendering for its paper, we have a central role to play in selection of the shortlist of options. As well as driving down the actual consumption of paper on a daily basis, it is important for us to use this opportunity to assess whether we can shift to a fully recycled sheet. We currently use two types of paper for either internal or external correspondence and this is an opportunity to see what is available in the market.
WRAP an advocacy group can provide impartial advice and industrial data. As well as the percentage of recycled content, key considerations will be its whiteness and brightness, the likely jam rate in our printers and the ability to source it in the UK and mainland Europe. This is another area which is constantly developing and it needs a good chunk of time-investment if the firm is to reap the benefits of improving service delivery and product. One suggestion for the title of the final briefing note was ‘Paying a premium for a dying product’ which gives an indication of the direction the market is taking.
Other topics which ‘The Practioner’ will be keeping a watchful eye over the coming months include the promised EU Green paper due out shortly, internal briefings on OFR and the Account Modernisation Directive.
MIke Kelly is head of CSR at KPMG LLP (UK) in London.
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