The perils of trying to do good
The United Nations CEO Water Mandate encourages companies to play a more active role in solving issues related to water availability and quality. The signing of the CEO Water Mandate on 23 March 2009 by Heineken’s CEO Jean-François van Boxmeer confirms the brewer’s commitment to both sustainability and water management, a company statement says.
Water has long been one of Heineken’s focus areas for sustainability. The brewer claims that in recent years it has improved its water efficiency by more than 10 percent and in parallel, has installed wastewater treatment plants at virtually all its breweries that do not have access to municipal wastewater facilities.
‘Over the last few decades, we have consistently reduced our water consumption and improved the quality of the water which we emit at the end of the brewing process’, says Jean-François van Boxmeer. ‘However, given the increasing challenges around water availability and quality, the CEO Water Mandate provides us with an excellent platform to share and learn best practice from others in this vitally important area.’
This is exactly what critics of the CEO Water Mandate doubt. The programme consists of ‘voluntary’ initiatives, meaning that the corporations involved have the full say over how much they do or don’t do to honour the terms of the Mandate itself. What is more, no one can hold them accountable if they do not achieve their own self-set goals.
Water is probable the single most hotly contested issue between NGOs and companies. Hence each opening of the World Water Forum was marked by demonstrations and counter forums that sought to challenge the role of private water corporations in setting the agenda for global water justice and policy.
To its critics, the CEO Water Mandate, an initiative launched in July 2007 and sponsored by the United Nations Global Compact Program, is just a PR exercise aimed at greenwashing companies. It is one of an increasingly dizzying array of ‘corporate social responsibility’ initiatives, they say, that make big promises about improving corporate practices, but in many cases have yet to deliver meaningful results. In this respect, The Mandate was no exception.
The Mandate’s leading endorsers currently include bottlers Coca-Cola, Danone, Nestlé, and PepsiCo, drinks company Diageo, as well as brewers SABMiller and Molson Coors.
