Sustainable Glove Choices Protect Workers and the World
Companies are now creating and prioritizing public-facing sustainability goals.
- By Rodney Taylor
- May 01, 2022
The business community has accepted sustainability as a core element of strategy and an essential component of a company’s overall value proposition.
Not only are investors increasingly engaged in assessing the climate impacts of companies, but customers are also expecting sustainability value from all the products they purchase. As a result, today it is easier to call out the number of S&P 500 companies that are not providing sustainability reports (only 8 percent) versus those who are. This is a fascinating statistic when you consider that a decade ago the number of non-reporters was 80 percent (Governance & Accountability Institute Inc., 2021). There has been a dramatic rise in investor assessment of non-financial Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance as part of their investment analysis and decision making. Third-party assurance of ESG performance in corporate reporting has now become standard practice for mid to large-cap companies worldwide. Despite these impressive gains there is still a long way to go in corporate disclosure of meaningful data and reduction targets that truly reduce and offset environmental impacts.
Companies are now creating and prioritizing public-facing sustainability goals. Many of these sustainability goals are extremely aggressive. What is less clear when you dig into sustainability execution plans is how individual operating units and business functions will make tangible contributions to these aggressive goals. Traditional “green” initiatives (e.g., reducing paper, internal recycling programs, etc.) will be necessary but not sufficient to meet sustainability targets. Achieving sustainability targets for reduced carbon emissions will take significant effort and expense and will require action across every organizational function. At the same time, managers are expected to trim costs and reduce operating budgets.
What’s Carbon Got to do With it?
In 1824, French physicist and father of modern heat transfer analysis Joseph Fourier calculated that an Earth-sized planet at our distance from the Sun should be much colder. He posited that something in the atmosphere must be acting like an insulating blanket and trapping heat. Future scientific investigation confirmed that there is a blanket primarily composed of carbon dioxide and water vapor in Earth's atmosphere that traps infrared radiation and maintains planetary temperatures in a range that supports life—this process is often referred to as the “greenhouse effect.” This phenomenon is critical to life on planet earth. However, further analysis by scientists has confirmed the composition of this blanket can be altered by changes in the atmospheric composition of certain gases. The main gases responsible for the greenhouse effect include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor (which all occur naturally), and fluorinated gases (which are synthetic). Greenhouse gases have different chemical properties and are removed from the atmosphere, over time, by different processes (NASA.gov).
This article originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.