In the thicket of it

WITH all due fanfare, on September 10th last year Dow Jones, a financial-news provider, declared Volkswagen to be the world’s most sustainable carmaker in its flagship sustainability index. Just weeks later it removed the firm. The news that 11m of VW’s diesel vehicles had been fitted with software to cheat emissions tests somewhat dented its credentials—and that of corporate sustainability itself.

After a couple of decades of worthy initiatives, acting to implement sustainable practices in a meaningful way is still far harder than gushing about it. “Sustainability is just being slightly less awful,” admits Chris Davis, who keeps the Body Shop, a cosmetics firm, on the right side of greenery. The hardest part is still getting businesspeople to understand that sustainability is not just a cost or a constraint, says Philippe Joubert, formerly an executive at Alstom, a French engineering firm, and now a sustainability adviser.

No accepted steps exist for going green, so sustainable approaches often end up bogged down in endless questionnaires and targets. And a lack of standard practices gives some firms leeway to cut corners. One dodge to give the appearance rather than achieve the reality of reducing pollution, for example, is to pick a particularly fume-laden year as a baseline, according to Peter Williams, an expert on sustainability data at IBM, a computing firm. Firms can ignore difficult areas, such as their heavy use of chemicals, entirely.

Many firms pursue a goal of carbon neutrality: they cut their output as much as possible and then pay to reduce emissions via special schemes. One example is Bain, a consulting firm, which boasts of offsetting the air miles it racks up through carefully monitored wind-power schemes in India and forestry programmes in Brazil. But the green projects into which many polluting firms pour money often lack robust certification or oversight, leaving their environmental credentials much flimsier than the glossy annual reports which describe them.

“Total chaos” surrounds environmental reporting by companies in America, according to Jean Rogers of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, a specialist body (one of many). There is no recognised standard for calculating total carbon impact, admits the Carbon Trust, another group. Taking into account the impact of a manufacturing process is one thing, but working out how a telecoms device pollutes over its life or the energy wasted from draughty office buildings is another. Tallying a firm’s overall environmental impact is extremely hard.

There is no getting away from the subject, however. Last year the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals were adopted. Many investors increasingly fret over environmental risks, and are demanding policies that lessen them. Consumers care more, too, as a rash of examples attests. Demand from businesspeople for courses on sustainability is rising.

They may learn that many of the most effective green initiatives are often measures that any well-run company should embrace. Over a decade to 2015, Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer, saved as much as $1 billion annually by doubling the efficiency of its American vehicle fleet by changing its routes. Veolia, a French conglomerate with businesses ranging from energy to waste, has found a way to extract valuable rare metals, such as palladium, from street sweepings. And Nike’s Flyknit technology, which allows sports shoes to be woven, not sewn together from pieces, cuts waste by four-fifths and earned revenues of about $1 billion in 2014. These are the sort of un-faddish ideas that could give corporate greenery a better reputation.