Corporate Sustainability Initiatives and Their Complex Motives

I just had a long and interesting conversation with a woman in Columbia who will be doing a bit of volunteer writing for us here; I’m certainly looking forward to reading her stuff.

We talked about what it takes to get paid to write about clean energy and sustainability more generally.  This isn’t an easy question to answer.  My best guess regarding the most direct path here, as I told her, is offering services to the private sector and their myriad of sustainability initiatives; I’m sure that at any one time, there are many hundreds of opportunities within the Fortune 500 alone for people to come on board and develop content, especially for publication online, as to what the corporate world is doing to lower its carbon footprint, improve the LCA (lifecycle analysis) of its products, etc.

But, we mused, are these initiatives sincere, or are they simply public relations?  That’s an even tougher question, as it’s a gray area.  If I looked hard enough, I’m sure I could find some that are pure greenwashing; I’m also sure that I could find some that are 100% sincere, whose owners couldn’t care less about their programs’ beneficial impacts on customer relations.

Both these two cases, however, would be extremely rare.  In almost all cases, sustainability initiatives are blossoming because everyone wins.  They are the right thing to do, and they earn generous dividends in terms of corporate PR.  Moreover, some of them actually drive profitability by reducing waste.