Han Yu, 54, remembers a green landscape when he was growing up in Wafang, an area near the Horqin desert in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. ‘That was when I was six or seven years old… the trees were tall then – poplar, elm, pine and willow,’ he recalls.
In his 20s, a population boom meant that more trees had to be cut down to build houses. Farmers also began to rear more cattle, sheep and horses, increasing the grazing pressure on the grasslands. ‘The situation just got worse every year until it became a desert,’ shares Han, a farmer with dark, bronzed skin and deep creases in his face, a result of living on the edge of a desert with its harsh summers and bitter winters.
By the 1980s, Horqin – which was once lush, thriving grassland – had turned into a desert, and the cause of yellow sandstorms that sweep across the Chinese mainland and other East Asian countries like Japan and Korea every year.
It’s a situation that companies like Timberland is trying to reverse, by replanting trees where it can. Every year, its Asian Pacific office sends out staff, business partners like distributors and journalists to plant trees in Horqin, in addition to pledging funds for the project.
The company has planted over a million trees since 2001, and recently re-committed to planting two million more trees within the next 10 years.
It was Timberland Japan which mooted the project, says Arthur Ang, regional marketing director for Timberland Asia Pacific region – because Japan was directly affected by the sandstorms from China.
Parts of the desert – 18 sq km, specifically – are turning green again, a small but significant speck of the total 50,000 sq km area. ‘We adopted this project because this is truly what Timberland stands for – our Corporate Social Responsibility is woven into the fabric of our company,’ says Mr Ang.
With its resources invested into green CSR measures, and put to use a decade or more ago, Timberland is among the companies leading the charge to make the environment the focus of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) projects.
It so happens that the company does have a personal stake in preserving nature and the environment, as Mr Ang points out. As in, why would anyone buy its famous yellow Timberland boots if there were no more nature to trek in?
A 2008 McKinsey survey noted that 70 per cent of companies it interviewed cited ‘brand protection and building’ as their reasons for ‘going green’. Timberland might be in pole position, but a quick survey will find corporates doing their bit for the environment – outside of their work places: such as facilitating access to clean water in Kirivong, Cambodia; conserving the whale shark population in Donsol, Philippines, and marine turtles in Melaka, Malaysia (undertaken by staff of Jebsen & Jessen (SEA), a diversified company with seven core businesses in South-east Asia).
Or donating solar lanterns to schools in rural villages in India (by Applied Materials, an energy solutions provider); building ‘green schools’ in China and Vietnam which incorporate green features; donating money for every kilo of recycled waste collected at primary schools; turning off electricity or upping the air-conditioning to make a statement about climate change (undertaken by CapitaLand and its philanthropic arm, CapitaLand Hope).
This year, Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts celebrates the 100,000th tree that the group has planted as part of its Greening Communities project, launched in 2007.
Even some companies with no obvious green stakes in their products and services are zooming in on environmental issues in their CSR scheme.
Going beyond environmental philanthrophy
German company BSH (Bosch und Siemens Hausgerate GmbH), which owns Gaggenau, the top-end kitchen appliance brand spent the last seven years developing a plant oil-based cooker to replace kerosene cookers, known to cause deforestation and generate harmful carbon dioxide emissions.
For BSH, the innovative plant oil cooker was a substantial CSR project, especially as the company remained committed to it for so long, notes Dirk Hoffman, the Singapore-based regional CEO of BSH Asia Pacific, India, Middle East/Africa, who hosted regional media at the launch of the Protos cooker in Jakarta in July.
In fact, it was when Dr Hoffman joined the company in Germany that a university project sparked his interest. ‘We’re always on the look-out for interesting projects related to our business, and this plant oil cooker invented by a university student popped up,’ he recalls, referring to the start of events in 1998.
After research into it, BSH decided that it could be something they could work with – for the benefit of low- to medium-income families rather than their middle- to high-income clientele. So they acquired the patents in 2003, and collaborated with various universities in Germany and the Philippines.
In 2004, the first prototype of the Protos was rolled out and for the next four years, tests were carried out in India and Indonesia in Asia and Congo, Tanzania and Ethiopia in Africa.
It’s not just a matter of developing a cooker that could use plant oil, says Dr Hoffman, even if that was a technological challenge in itself.
‘We also had to research cooking cultures, eating habits, geographical characteristics and available fuel sources,’ he says, listing the different parts that needed to be looked into for a holistic system which can support plant oil cookers.
Finally, the company’s R&D personnel came up with a third generation Protos cooker and that’s the one that has been in production since 2010.
More than 1,000 units have been sold in Indonesia already, and the target is to sell more than 40,000 in three years, says Dr Hoffman, adding that he’s very fortunate to be able to see the fruition of something he started seven years ago.
BSH has spent at least 1 million euro a year on the project since 2003, for the R&D and the staff, while they received about 690,000 euro from the German and Dutch governments, and also private foundations.
The technological details are one thing. What makes the plant oil stove a challenge to design? It’s because the oil has to be vaporised and burnt at a high degree, explains Samuel N Shiroff, who has been Protos project manager since 2007.
And then to support the effective use of the stove, BSH also has to work with NGOs to encourage farmers to plant Jatropha trees for the oil, as other plant oils aren’t as suitable because of cost or availability (such as coconut, rapeseed, or castor) even if they can technically be used. The only plant oil that can’t be used with the stove is palm oil.
But with an innovation like this, says Mr Shiroff, the cooker – which is targeted at replacing the kerosene cooker – will save the cutting of firewood and lower carbon emissions.
The environmental result? Two hundred litres of kerosene replaced by plant oil will reduce carbon emissions by 500kg a year. That’s because in Indonesia alone, some 50 million people, or 15 million families on average use kerosene for cooking, and emissions from kerosene cookers are up to 10 times higher than plant oil cookers.
‘Although the cooker is more expensive than the kerosene cooker (BSH is trying to retail it for only US$20 to $25; S$24 to S$30), it does have a life span of seven years, as opposed to kerosene cooker’s several months,’ says Mr Shiroff.
Besides the environmental impact, the plant oil cooker also makes cooking safer for women and children. The World Health Organisation estimates that 800,000 women and 300,000 children die every year from indoor pollution caused by the kerosene cooker as the burning of biomasses like wood, dung, agricultural waste emits poisonous smoke. And then there are the cooker explosions and fire hazards.
As for Timberland’s Horqin desert reforestation project, the company sends some 100 volunteers a year to plant trees like pine and prune the existing poplar trees to encourage better growth.
The US-based company which was the first to put its logo on a shoe, has spent more than US$5 million on this project since 2001. Since 2007 however, the company has leveraged on it along with its Earthkeepers’ campaign which is the company’s commitment to use recycled or recyclable products.
‘The benefits include employee engagement and ‘walking the talk’. In the end, it also spurs us to make better products,’ says Mr Ang.
Tree planting is a key thrust of the company’s global CSR programmes, and it also has a project in Haiti which now includes six nurseries for trees that will give food, shelter, fuel and forest cover.
The company has a vice-president for CSR activities, a group of ‘Global Stewards’ in the world to look after its CSR projects and offers its staff 40 hours of paid time off for service to full time employees and 20 hours to part time employees for volunteer and community work a year.
Hands-on high
Getting employees involved in spreading the environmental message seems quite key to green CSR efforts. Forward-thinking companies like Applied Material and Jebsen & Jessen show that corporates can play a part, whether big or small.
‘Improving the way people live, that’s the fundamental core value of our company,’ says Russell Tham, Regional President, Applied Materials South East Asia.
The future for green CSR
The company has focused on green CSR activities for the past 10 years, especially since it provides energy and environmental solutions. ‘And we especially target educating the young,’ adds Mr Tham, citing its Bright Future Card Game (now conducted online) where a core group of employees go to schools to facilitate the game. Twenty-two primary and secondary schools have been involved, and the company is keen to expand the reach.
Then, bigger companies like Capitaland also have a dedicated Green Committee to spearhead group-wide environmental, health and safety initiatives in Singapore and overseas – since 2006. ‘There is a growing sense of environmental awareness among corporations as more consumers are becoming more discerning and environmentally conscious,’ notes Wong Hooe Wai, chairman of Capitaland’s Green Committee.
The uptake on environmental consciousness is still slow however, thinks Heinrich Jessen, chairman of Jebsen & Jessen. ‘In the mid 1990s, there was a lot of talk about the environment, and the thinking was that there would be changes just around the corner, but it’s been slow going,’ he says.
It’s been slow because governments now have to worry more about the global economy rather than global warming. Somewhat hesitant to go public with his pessimism, Mr Jessen thinks that even if the company stopped its green programmes, it wouldn’t necessarily cause eyelids to blink.
‘I wonder how critical it is. Our own staff have a certain degree of interest, but I think environmental issues are too far down the ladder for people to care about,’ he adds.
Not that Jebsen & Jessen is a slacker. For the record, the company started its environmental, health and safety programme in 1995, but measures were largely internal until four years ago when it launched employee CSR programmes which are both socially and environmentally targeted; partnering with World Vision and World Wildlife Fund.
Trained in environmental management, Mr Jessen led the drive to make sure the company has all the necessary ISO certifications and that it reached a degree of consistency in its environmental measures for operations. The company is also looking to become a carbon-neutral company, which is quite rare for companies in Asia, he thinks.
Hands-on staff volunteerism
Now that its operations are on its way to becoming greener, the company has started sending its staff from eight business units in eight countries for hands-on community work. ‘We’re thinking of increasing the frequency and number of staff for it, in fact,’ he says, adding that the idea was to create a bond between staff from different departments and countries who would otherwise never meet.
‘We wanted the staff to get involved in their communities and contribute their own sweat (and blood),’ says Mr Jessen.
The benefit of hands-on volunteerism is tremendous, as Celine Teo Swee Ling, regional brand manager for Timberland (Asia Pacific) attests to, who says that having personally taken part in the Horqin project, it has made her more aware of her surroundings.
‘I have always been interested in environmental sustainability but did not have the knowledge of how I can make a difference before joining Timberland. Sometimes, it seems like a tall order, planting trees to change the environment – but having seen the progress over the past few years and speaking with the locals, it is evident that every small step taken by any individual can make a difference.’
Ultimately, people will be concerned about the environment when it affects them directly, says Yoshio Kitaura, managing director of Japan’s Green Network who manages the Horqin Desert reforestation programme.
He spearheaded the tree planting effort because Japan relies on China for its wheat flour to make soba noodles, among other products. Japan is also affected by the sand storms which blow in from China and coat their cities with a fine coat of sand.
‘If we don’t help China, we will also suffer in the long run,’ he points out simply.
As villagers who live around the Horqin desert, like Han Yu, have experienced for themselves, their immediate living environment is a lot better now with the reforestation of the desert. ‘We now know that it’s bad to cut down too many trees, or to have over-grazing. That’s why we plant trees and maintain them and try to maintain nature’s balance,’ he notes.
And that, neatly sums up the state of the environment today: where no country is an island, and that we all have to do our bit to make the world a greener place (to use a modified cliche); and it helps when corporations are leading the change.
