Personal environmental impact reporting has taken off over the last couple of months. I've seen personal carbon reporting crop on on Dopplr and The Carbon Account. The corporate side of this movement is documented on blogs like Green Monk and Wisdom of Clouds.
Over the last few weeks, some thoughts have been bubbling around thanks to multiple conversations and some interesting blogs linked below, the motivating question being how to close a feedback loop around environmental and social impacts, and thereby (hopefully) influence behavior. One example paradigm is the area of nutritional information on packaging.
Nutrition facts on our food products are now a fact of life. Nutrition labeling arguably allows consumers to make more informed purchasing and eating decisions. The value of this informed-ness is, I think, dubious in the context of an individual purchasing decision because of deficiencies in our ability to extrapolate from specific experiences to the general conclusions, from health impact data to healthy life choices.
But providing information gives the purchaser the power to take a more methodological approach to comparing choices. Advocacy groups have seized on this information to raise awareness and recommend good choices for purchasers.
Food producers, in turn, compete on the basis of the nutritional content of their food and the resulting third-party analyses. For leading corporations and small producers who relish the opportunity to seize the initiative, this new competitive arena has proven rewarding. Rewarding in the sense of profitability and brand recognition, but also in the sense of an evolutionary (though certainly not revolutionary) improvement in the nutritional health of those who eat these products.
With the growing awareness of the environmental, social, and economic impacts of our lifestyle and our production, I wonder if the time is ripe for a more comprehensive acknowledgment of impact through reporting on packaging. Should we have a "carbon impact" section on our packaging right next to "saturated fats"? Should we list water consumption in liters? Should environmental poison emissions like mercury be listed next to the "vitamins and minerals"? Should this reporting be applied to all products, not just those food products that currently sport "nutrition facts" labels?
The answer is probably yes. Leading corporations and producers should welcome and embrace this sort of challenge. As JP Rangaswami has been repeating lately, following Peter Drucker: People make shoes, not money. Anything that can help us make better shoes is probably a long-run win. "Better" is consistently coming to mean greener, healthier, and more socially responsible.
To report externally in these areas would not be easy, but work on the thorniest issues appears to be underway. Development of reporting standards and metrics would be required. Independent organizations like the AMEE, GRI are working on these issues. Government organizations like the EPA or the DHHS (and equivalents) would probably need to be involved. A knotty question: Could this be a voluntary movement or if it would require government mandates?
Reporting competency would have to be developed internally before accurate external reporting is possible. The internal reporting infra-structures of corporations tend to be focused on financials, specifically revenue and costs. It may be possible to re-purpose or extend financial systems to include additional measures such as carbon costs. Other systems may have to be built from the ground up, such as energy usage monitoring and management systems.
All this costs money, but I wonder if these campaigns can be financed as marketing, employee satisfaction, corporate transformation, or performance management efforts? I'm sure most capital projects for energy efficiency have been justified in this manner. The payoff from a well-executed impact reporting effort would come in all of these areas and more.
If a carbon tax or universal cap-and-trade system is ever put in place in a country where a company operates, this type of reporting will become a requirement of doing business, rather than a requirement of doing business well. Would it be advantageous to get ahead of the curve and start doing business well now?