Kerry's Weeek 7: Personal Experience

Personal Experience: Corporate Social Responsibility

Reading through the instructional materials this week about corporate social responsibility (especially the piece from The Economist), brought back so many memories of my time spent in purchasing at USC as the sustainable sourcing specialist. In 2007, as the first person at the university with the word sustainability title, and in a newly created position within Business Services, I had no prior knowledge of what sustainable sourcing was, let alone how to do it! So the first thing I did was start to educate myself on what sustainability meant in terms of buying goods and services. Very quickly, I found myself jumping onto the green bandwagon…discovering what was meant by a carbon footprint and acronyms like PCW (post-consumer waste), FSC (Forestry Stewardship Council), and CFLs (compact fluorescent light bulbs).

After arming myself with what I thought was a minimum of information (and what turned out to be merely scratching the surface), I began to talk to suppliers about what they knew about the sustainability of their industries and products. I found out that many of the large companies such as Office Depot, Hewlett Packard, and most of the large furniture manufacturers have whole departments devoted to sustainability! And all of them are very eager to partner with clients such as USC to help them decrease their impact on the environment.

One of the things I discovered within myself that I think most organizations go through when getting their feet wet in going green is an almost paralyzing fear that whatever I did was either going to be wrong or not enough. But I realized that whatever I did was going to be more than USC had every done before, so I took a deep breath and took a leap of faith…in myself.

I wanted to start with something that would have high visibility and impact, and involve the whole university without anyone having to put forth too much effort. So I decided to launch a print-cartridge recycling program. The most important thing about any new initiative at USC is that it has to be something that requires little or no effort or it will not work. So I collaborated with Mailing Services and a USC supplier that sold remanufactured print-cartridges to come up with a way to collect the cartridges on pallets in Mailing Services for pick-up by the supplier. I designed this label:

The process was, departments could put cartridges in any kind of container (envelope, box, etc.), affix this label to it and put it in their outgoing mail for pick-up by Mailing Services. Mailing Services collected the cartridges on pallets until enough were collected for the supplier to come pick them up. In the first year of the program, we diverted nearly three tons of cartridges from the landfill! The program became so popular that I was contacted by a graduate student in Annenberg who wanted to record me talking about the program for a video project.

This was just one of the many initiatives I attempted to implement during my short time as the university’s sustainable sourcing specialist. Unfortunately, USC falls into that category of organizations mentioned in this week’s readings that is more interested in saving money than helping to preserve the environment for future generations. No matter how many ways I tried to make listeners understand that being green does not always need to mean spending more money, that attitude continues to prevail. I fear that the only way USC and many other organizations are going to make a conscious effort to embrace sustainability is when they are compelled to do so by changes in public policy…which will be here before you know it! But no matter how long I stand upon my green soapbox, no matter how many student groups come to me seeking my help in getting their schools and the administration to participate in their efforts to raise the visibility of sustainability, no matter how many classes, workshops, seminars and conferences I speak at, this is one of those subjects that, while it may inspire people to action at the time, is quickly forgotten when they leave the room.

The low-hanging fruit of swapping out old fluorescent lighting figures for new energy-efficient ones, recycling printer cartridges and encouraging the campus to use nothing less green than 30% PCW paper in their printers and copiers is not enough to change USC’s philosophical point of view from reactive to proactive on all things sustainable. As yet, sustainability hasn’t even gotten a mention in the university’s current $6 billion (yes, that’s billion with a B) fund raising campaign. Now, thanks to a recent reorganization within my department, I am no longer involved in sustainability at any level. This means that with the exception of the cartridge recycling program, the promotion of the use of sustainable goods at USC has ceased.

What’s a green-loving girl to do?