| It’s important to separate rhetoric from reality when it comes to corporate ethics. Companies not only need to say how they will meet their ethical goals, they need to do as they say. And prove it. At HP our approach has been to define an ethical position from a number of perspectives, including how the company is governed, how we conduct business and how we respond to our economic, social and environmental responsibilities. We then judge how we perform in these areas, and take note of how others rate us too.
This issue of the HP Global Citizenship Bulletin explores a range of ways that HP lives up to these ethical standards across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
We talk with our supply chain responsibility experts Bonnie Nixon Gardiner and Karl Daumueller about work to ensure all our suppliers meet the same social and environmental standards that we set. We look at the complex and controversial issue of remanufacturing, and set out why HP prefers to recycle rather than remanufacture ink cartridges.
We also feature news on the latest Digital Community Centre opening in Northern Ireland, and reflect on how this initiative provides struggling communities with basic computer, internet and business skills. Finally, we review some of the issues that HP and others were engaged in at the ICT & Sustainability Forum at the end of January in Brussels.
The New Year has seen our approach on ethics acknowledged by ethical rating specialist Covalence. On 2 January the Geneva-based company announced HP had scooped the number 1 position among technology companies in the Covalence Ethical Ranking 2005. Across all industries, HP was ranked number 7.
Covalence’s ethical quotation system is a reputation index that draws on scores related to 45 criteria. The criteria are organised into four groups, covering working conditions, impact of production, impact of product and institutional impact.
Multinational companies are rated on their contribution to each. The ranking acts as a barometer of how multinationals are perceived in the ethical field.
Covalence’s laudable aim is to provide information about the economic, social and environmental impact of multinational companies. They collate thousands of documents from the media, enterprise, NGO and other sources, and use it to produce EthicalQuote curves. These curves measure the historical evolution of the reputation of companies regarding ethical issues. They are created through the cumulative addition of positive news and negative news.
Covalence was established in Geneva in 2001. It has been supported by the Graduate Institute of Development Studies and NGOs such as ADAP (Association pour le Développement des Aires Protégées), AGSI (Association Geste Solidaire Immédiat) and GRAD (Groupe de Réalisations et d'Animations pour le Développement).
If you have any comments or questions about the articles in this issue, or any other aspect of global citizenship, please do let us know. Just click here
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