Eight of Europe’s biggest alcohol firms have united to launch new rules for their own advertising in an effort to head off tighter regulation. Carlsberg, Heineken and Diageo are among the alcohol giants that have agreed the “Responsible Marketing Pact”, which has been launched this month and will cover all European Union countries. A key measure is a commitment not to target children, particularly on social media.
Consumer goods industry taking on public sector roles
Heineken, the world’s third biggest brewery, is hatching plans to build hospitals and schools in crisis-torn Haiti. The move demonstrates the growing role of the private sector, particularly the consumer goods industry, in taking on public sector roles in poorer countries. Nestlé, the world’s biggest food group by sales, is building and renovating 40 schools in the Ivory Coast together with the NGO World Cocoa Foundation.
P&G makes sustainability analysis tool freely available
Procter & Gamble has made its environmental sustainability scorecard analysis tool freely available for use by any company. The Excel-based tool, launched last year, enables companies to measure and interpret key environmental sustainability metrics across their supply chains and identify progress as well as opportunities for improvement. It measures absolute or intensity improvements in nine key metrics including energy use, water use, waste disposal and greenhouse gas emissions on a year-to-year basis. P&G estimates that the scorecard has led to nearly $1 billion in bottom-line operational savings from reductions in energy, water, waste and CO2 at its facilities over the past ten years.
Olympic medal pollution protesters disrupt Rio Tinto meeting
The annual meetings of two of London’s biggest mining companies Rio Tinto and Anglo American were disrupted by environmental protesters and unionists from around the world. Protesters, some wearing gas masks, gathered outside Rio Tinto’s annual meeting near Parliament to highlight claims of “life-threatening” air pollution from mines producing metal for the London 2012 Olympic medals. A coalition of unions, including the United Steelworkers and Unite, also called on the International Olympic Committee to drop Rio Tinto as its official medal provider over claims of ill treatment of some of its miners.
Mining giant Glencore accused in child labour and acid dumping row
An investigation by the BBC‘s Panorama current affairs programme has accused Glencore, the commodity and mining firm worth £27 billion, of dumping acid into a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It also claims to have discovered children as young as 10 working in the Tilwezembe mine, which, according to Glencore, was officially closed in 2008. International law prohibits anyone under 18 working in a mine. Undercover researchers at Tilwezembe found under-18s who climbed down hand-dug mineshafts 150 feet deep without safety or breathing equipment to dig copper and cobalt.
HP, Intel and GE start fund to boost conflict-free minerals
A new fund backed by Intel, HP and the GE Foundation in the United States aims to lower the cost for smelters (smelting is a form of extractive metallurgy) that seek to prove they are conflict-free. It joins a variety of programmes that have sprung up to support different stages of the mineral supply chain. The new Conflict-Free Smelters (CFS) Early-Adopters Fund was created to promote early participation in the Conflict-Free Smelter programme overseen by the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI).
Greenpeace takes a bite out of computing providers’ dirty datacentres
Greenpeace has warned a number of cloud computing providers, including Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, about the damaging effects their datacentres are having on the environment. In a new report, entitled “How Clean is Your Cloud“, Greenpeace said there is a split in the technology industry between companies that are taking steps to power their clouds with clean energy, such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook, and those whose datacentres run on so-called “dirty energy” like coal and nuclear power.
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