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The recent news that Nestlé plans to coat a proportion of their Kit Kats in Fair Trade chocolate, discussed a few days ago in the CO3 blog, has raised an interesting point. It is clear that opponents of the company, such as the Baby Milk Action campaign, feel that this decision is a PR ploy. [...]

How much do you know about your footwear? We would probably expect manufacturers to talk about their supply chains, their labour practices, in short, their corporate social responsibility. But, for some reason, there isn’t as much information out there as you might like.
Perhaps Britain’s best known shoe company is Clarks, or C&J Clark Ltd, to [...]

The news that Nestlé has decided to coat Kit Kat, which has been the UK’s favourite chocolate bar for as long as anyone can remember, in Fair Trade chocolate didn’t surprise us in CO3 world. In a refreshingly honest radio interview this morning, a representative of the company explained the bottom line. This decision is [...]

The CO3 award goes to the wonderfully named Julie’s Bicycle .
We’re a fan of cross-industry CSR initiatives and have worked, in the past, with one of the best known ones. This, however, has a more formal name and is known as the International Council on Mining and Metals or ICMM to their friends.
We discovered Julie’s [...]

An interesting article appeared in a recent edition of the Times, citing current levels of coal storage at power stations up and down the country.  Apparently “Britain’s coal mountain has soared to its highest level in nearly 15 years”, as plant operators take advantage of recession-fuelled low prices.  The article appears, ironically, little more than [...]

One of the things we have always found a little depressing about the “CSR sector” in which we are bracketed is the failure of many practitioners within it to coherently articulate the importance of CSR concepts. The results of this state of affairs is more confusion, not less, about the what, why, and how [...]

The Accounting Standards Board (ASB) recently published ‘A Review of Narrative Reporting by UK Listed Companies in 2008/2009′. The ASB is an operating body of the Financial Reporting Council (FRC). The FRC is the UK’s independent regulator responsible for promoting confidence in corporate reporting and governance.
Of the eight Companies Act requirements reviewed, one pertains specifically [...]

The last few weeks have seen a concentration of stories relating to women in business hitting the headlines. Apparently, female-managed hedge funds lost less money than male-managed ones, Harriet Harman will shake things up in the City and get more women on boards, and we can invest in a fund that specialises in gender-diverse companies.
It [...]

Whilst a significant proportion of global listed companies have, over the past few years, chosen to represent their approach to CSR in the exclusive setting of an annual standalone publication, others have attempted to deploy the latest internet technologies, in a bid to bring this slice of corporate information to life organically ‘on the page’.
What [...]

The United States Chamber of Commerce is a not-for-profit business federation that lobbies and campaigns for the interests of businesses across the US. That’s the idea, anyway. Right now, the US Senate is debating whether to pass the Waxman-Markey bill on climate change, a piece of fairly serious legislation, and the Chamber has stated its [...]