Someone teach me how to spot greenwash
From today’s Business Times’ feature on Mr. Sukanto Tanoto, billionaire founder of pulp and paper company Asia Pacific Resources International (APRIL).
A major lesson [Mr. Tanoto] has imbibed is the necessity of corporate social responsibility (CSR). One of his most controversial problems was with his first pulp company PT Indoraya Utama in Sumatra, which became the target of a series of violent community protests, amid allegations of pollution and land disputes in the late 1990s. The business eventually shut down.
In a previous interview with the Financial Times, Mr Tanoto admitted candidly: ‘At that time (the Suharto era), we thought that poverty and society and taking care of the people was a government job . . . So we learnt the hard way, we made some mistakes. In the end we realised that when you come to a certain size of operation, you must have a clear sense of social responsibility.’
April, for instance, now has a well-entrenched CSR programme. It issues a detailed sustainability report every two years and works closely with NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to protect high-conservation value forests in Riau, as well as wild animals like elephants.
It funds schools around Kerinci, Riau, where its main operations are based, and has also established an integrated farming system to teach villagers more viable and sustainable alternatives to the slash-and-burn techniques of shifting cultivation. Those who graduate from the three-week courses are given seeds, cattle, fish and fertiliser as start-up capital.
In my mind APRIL had always been associated with illegal timber exports, illegal forest clearing and the haze. To hear that APRIL even has a CSR programme and works closely with WWF is, to put it mildly, surprising.
So I checked out the corporate website.
It seems that an extraordinary effort has been made to stem accusations of environmental irresponsibility. Right there on the front page - where companies usually market their products or services - we see APRIL mentioning sustainability twice, and a very overt list of the companies CSR commitments. We learn immediately that the company is a member of the UN Global Compact, "corporate partner" of the UNEP awards, and that it works with the WWF. Moving further into the website, we find annual sustainability reports and semi-annual CSR newsletters.
It should be quite interesting to see how the corporate rhetoric gels with external allegations…
