Corporate responsibility has never been enough
Tell the data-driven story that points to business model transformation
Anyone who’s been involved in sustainability or ESG for any length of time comes up against some difficult questions. Things like: how is it we have so many governance and reporting standards while the problems keep getting worse? And if the systems that support human and ecological health are declining, how is it that so many global companies are profitable and growing?
ESG consultants and in-house folks tasked — at least by title — with solving these problems are busier than ever, working with ever-more senior corporate decision-makers and investors. And yet the Sisyphean effort of making positive change from within the mainstream industrial system never seems to advance.
That’s because it doesn’t work. No amount of corporate responsibility ambition can get at the changes required. What’s needed instead is transparent data on how companies’ business models are contributing to the systemic problems, and real plans to change this, ASAP.
That’s what Matereality is all about, and in this post I’ll demonstrate how to get started using the company Scott’s Miracle-Gro (SMG).
How Matereality assesses corporate impact: Scott’s Miracle-Gro tutorial
My grandmother was an avid gardener, always surround by lush plants and flowers. A bottle of Miracle-Gro was always somewhere handy in her home.
Times have changed dramatically since she was beautifying her suburban Toronto home and backyard. As a society, we’ve learned a tremendous amount about the impacts of our nature-controlling, profit-maximizing economy. We’ve also entered an era of ecological tipping points and societal stresses that call for new ways of meeting our economic needs.
SMG has changed in the ensuing decades, too. It was a humble seller of weed-free seeds in 1868. It is now a $US3.5 billion company generating returns for shareholders by manufacturing and/or marketing many products that kill weeds (aka biodiversity), or helps growers of weed (aka cannabis).
And yet they have tremendous growing know-how and community-level relationships that are essential for the kind of bioregional restoration required to turn things around.
In its 2023 ESG report, SMG says: “We ask ourselves what a good company would do and strive to act accordingly.”
I aim to answer this question by applying a Matereality lens. What follows is a step-by-step look at Matereality basics, using SMG as a case study. (NB: This is a mini-assessment and does not include stakeholder interviews nor an exhaustive review of all SMG disclosures.) It is based on public corporate disclosures and informed opinion, in the spirit of progress towards industrial healing.
In case this sounds familiar, 2022 I wrote an open letter to SMG’s CEO — Dear Mr. Hegedorn, you killed my compost worms — after one of their products killed my compost worms. This was the initial prompt to look at the company. Since then, I developed Matereality.
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