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Sustainability in Company Management:The Swiss Experience
11th April 2019 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
In Switzerland, some private companies seem to care about their environmental and societal performance. Why is this so? And is it more than just greenwashing?
In my experience structural and personal aspects intermingle as to how management ponders ethical considerations. Concepts like license to operate, bottom line versus triple bottom line, personal attitudes, they all shape decision making in companies. We’ll look at a few companies—from smaller family-owned firms to corporations like Credit Suisse or McDonald’s Switzerland.
In the main, we’ll look at a method for environmental assessment of products and processes, which I co-developed in the 1990’s. The method is regularly updated by our Swiss Office for the Environment BAFU. It is used for product enviro evaluation and for company eco-controlling. It uses ‘Ecofactors’ as yardstick for eco-impacts (e.g. CO2e gets 0,5 ecopoints per gram, while SO2 yields 21 ecopts/g, etc.). After 30 years of application in Switzerland, ecofactors covering the EU just got published. The approach supports environmental aspects in decision making. It got included in Swiss legislation, e.g. a bio-fuel needs to show an ecobalance superior to fossil fuels in order to be tax-exempt. Yet, the method is criticized by peers and (ISO-)standards. Of course, it has its pros and cons, and I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts.
Arthur Braunschweig is a visiting scholar at Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment. He has a Ph.D. from University St. Gallen (CH), and will talk based on his work as sustainability consultant in Switzerland at E2, part-time faculty for sustainable management at Zürich’s ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), and e.g. developer of the environmental assessment method “Ecological scarcity”.
A presentation of the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management program and the Milano Management programs.
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