I hate greenwashing companies almost as much as I hate the out-and-out, don’t-give-a-shit planet-trashers. So, when I heard what Danone was up to at its Harrogate Spring Water bottling plant, I found myself swearing out loud.
20 years ago, local school children in that vicinity planted a four-acre community woodland. It’s much loved. A lot of those kids, now grown up, still live locally, still feel deeply connected. But Danone/Harrogate Spring Water care nothing about that. They need to expand their bottling plant, so the woodland’s 1000 trees have to go – and council officers at North Yorkshire Council have recommended that local councillors should approve the proposal.
So: a cut-and-dried case of deforestation. Replacing an established woodland with an industrial development. 1,300 objections have been submitted by people unpersuaded by Danone’s promise to plant 490 new trees very close to the woodland that will be lost – as well as a further 3,000 trees around the district.
And this is where the greenwashing kicks in: Danone is committed to being 100% deforestation-free in its supply chains by 2030 – and claims to be more than 97% of the way there. And it bangs on and on about its “Forest Positive” credentials.
This kind of blatant, utterly uncaring hypocrisy goes on day after day – and the whole idea of corporate sustainability now finds itself at a very low ebb indeed.
It’s 15 years since Michael Porter and Mark Kramer galvanised the stodgy world of Corporate Social Responsibility with their report in the Harvard Business Review, ‘Creating Shared Value’, with the not unambitious sub-title of: ‘How to Reinvent Capitalism and Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth’.
I stumbled across that article the other day – clearing out some corporate sustainability stuff going back more than 20 years – with lots of passages dutifully underlined, margins liberally populated with asterisks and exclamation marks, even an incredulous ‘You Must Be Joking!’ expostulation. Reading it was not just a trip down memory lane: it was super-depressing.
Nobody talks about Shared Value these days. Back then, the idea that the surplus value created by companies could be shared more equitably between shareholders, employees, suppliers, communities and other stakeholders did indeed present itself as an imaginative way of rescuing capitalism from its own worst tendencies, moving beyond ‘self-defeating trade-offs between business and society’.
“Companies can create economic value by creating societal value. There are three distinct ways to do this: by reconceiving products and markets; redefining productivity in the value chain; and building supportive industry clusters at the company’s locations. Each of these is part of the virtuous circle of shared value; improving value in one area gives rise to opportunities in the others”.
Well, yes – depending on how much faith you have in the idea of companies acting voluntarily for the ‘common good’– in the absence of legislation. In retrospect, Porter and Kramer were staggeringly naive in their expectations of the so-called ‘voluntary principle’.
I suspect my rather dyspeptic view of Shared Value may be a reflection of the much, much darker times in which we are now living. Serious backsliding has been going on in every sector of the economy for the last two or three years, with some companies explicitly flagging their retreat, whilst others just go silent – ‘greenhushing’ – for fear of political retribution. Most of this is being led by developments in America, with the Trump administration intent on purging the economy of the entirely Unamerican Trinity of DEI, CSR and ESG — and any other dodgy, woke-sounding acronym!
A lot of corporate sustainability-related activity isn’t very useful anyway. A report from IBM last year showed that spending on sustainability reporting exceeds companies’ spending on sustainability innovation by 43%. And without that innovation, no amount of often formulaic, box-ticking reporting will make a dime of difference.
One thing’s for sure: for those choosing the coward’s path, there won’t be any of the big banks or asset managers on their backs to remind them that this isn’t very smart. After many years of paying lip service to ESG principles, they’ve been delighted to be able to get back to profit-maximising, devil-take-the-hindmost banking and investing. Voluntary initiatives like the Net Zero Asset Managers and Global Financial Alliance For Net Zero (which they signed up to not too long ago with such florid and fulsome enthusiasm) are now completely forgotten. Even the Powering Past Coal Alliance (no new investment in coal really is the very least we should be asking of these merchants of death!) is rapidly powering down. All of which means that the big asset managers (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and Fidelity – with $23 trillion of combined assets under management) no longer use their votes to support climate or wider sustainability resolutions at companies’ AGMs.
Which tells us that the whole concept of for-profit corporations ‘voluntarily sharing value‘ has always been a total illusion. Boards of Directors can always claim that they have ironclad fiduciary duties to meet, in terms of shareholder primacy, even if all the evidence tells us that doing right by shareholders is absolutely not incompatible with doing right by society and the environment.
In his new book, ‘Ecocivilisation’ (out in May), Jeremy Lent points out that no explicit legal requirement mandates this in most cases, but a century or more of legal precedents has entrenched shareholder primacy as the non-negotiable imperative for companies today:
“The result is an entity that, judged by its behaviour, fits the clinical profile of a psychopath. It feels no genuine empathy. It calculates whether to break the law based on a dispassionate cost-benefit analysis of the likelihood of detection versus expected fines. It pursues its goals behind an attractive, carefully maintained social façade. And it will discard any employee, community, or ecosystem whenever doing so improves the bottom line”.
(He does then point out that it is “essential” to distinguish between the company as an institution, and the people who work within it, who are clearly not psychopaths as individuals! and I’m sure that’s true for Danone and Harrogate Spring Water).
As David Korten argued so powerfully more than 30 years ago (in his brilliant ‘When Corporations Rule the World’), the limited liability company has no intrinsic right to exist. It’s a legal instrument – a charter granted by society on the implicit assumption that the company will simultaneously be serving society’s interests. That was the original understanding, before big business and compliant governments rewrote the terms. Which means that a charter is not a right, but a conditional grant – and one that democratic societies could choose to withhold or even completely revoke.
The real issue here – as it almost always is – is political failure. Governments the world over are failing to impose higher standards; failing to raise the bar in order to meet legitimate societal expectations of corporates; failing to force them to stop externalising many costs of production (most egregiously, greenhouse gases into the atmosphere), to stop exploiting employees, and to stop paying themselves utterly obscene amounts of money.
Even the holier-than-thou European Commission (which still makes quite a song and dance about its leadership in this space) has fallen foul of the same ’pressures from the market’. It’s more than a year since the Commission announced major cuts and delays in various corporate sustainability reporting and due diligence rules – for instance, exempting 80% of companies that would have been held to account by its Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, and deferring reporting requirements from 2026 to 2028. Guess why: “the Commission is persuaded that these simplified requirements will greatly boost competitiveness”.
And that’s perfectly possible – in the short term. But at whose expense in the long term?
To be, sure this will swing back to something closer to sanity (if not to physical reality), some of the damage will be undone, and governments will rediscover that they really do have a mandate to put people before profits.
But here’s the thing: humankind’s sad little geopolitical farce (markets vs. society) may well be cyclical, flowing ‘predictably’ back and forth. But Nature doesn’t work like that. With very rare exceptions, the changes we’re witnessing in real time, right now, in the climate, in eco-system stability, in cumulative levels of pollution, are not cyclical.
So how many cycles in geopolitical dysfunctionality do you suppose are still available to us before irreversible shifts in critical planetary systems kick in?
I suspect we all know the answer to that one.
Jonathon Porritt 1 1 May 2026
