From the Associate editor
Sustainability is increasingly a key focus point for consumers, investors, and companies in all industries, and the tobacco industry is no exception. Balance sheet bottom lines, brand equity, sales volumes, and innovative products – while obviously integral factors – are no longer enough to satisfy stakeholders.
Nattira Medvedeva
Nattira Medvedeva, Associate Editor
In the tobacco industry, sustainability is not limited to just environmentally friendly leaf cultivation practices such as planting methods, soil conservation, and pest and water management. Rather, sustainability is used as a guiding force to determine a company’s approach to human rights, such as labor standards, livelihoods, workers’ rights, employee health and safety and consumer health; environmental issues such as reducing carbon emissions, conserving resources such as water, using biodegradable filters to reduce littering, and reducing waste; and practicing and promoting good governance and business standards, as well as operating with integrity.
Big industry players like PMI, BAT, JTI, KT&G, and Imperial Brands of course all have their sustainability strategies and initiatives well planned and in place, as do companies that supply resources to the industry. BMJ, well-known for its innovative approach in paper making, is an interesting example of this. BMJ’s commitment to sustainability is demonstrated through its various initiatives implemented in its paper making process all the way to its “Green Oasis” headquarters.
Committing to sustainability certainly is not without its challenges, such as higher financial requirements and pushback from involved stakeholders on different initiatives. For example, despite natural fertilizers believed to be more environmentally friendly, farmers were surprisingly more reluctant to switch from chemical fertilizers to natural ones.
However, all the efforts, commitment, and investment the tobacco industry poured into sustainability certainly seems to epitomize the saying “no good deed goes unpunished”. As with anything the industry does, “haters gonna hate”. The industry continuously gets accused of greenwashing – a term defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as “disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image.” For example, a report released in May by the World Health Organization and STOP, a self-proclaimed “global tobacco industry watchdog” funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, alleges that the tobacco industry is “talking trash” when communicating their sustainability initiatives to stakeholders, media, and consumers. WHO and STOP even called for governments to ban tobacco companies’ “greenwashing activities” and for accreditation organizations to “not endorse industry greenwashing or provide awards to the tobacco industry.” In that same month, WHO also released another report accusing the tobacco industry of “poisoning our planet.” In both reports, combustible cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, and vapes were all accused of various offences from endangering people’s health to causing deforestation, increasing carbon dioxide levels, and creating immense volumes of waste and pollution.
The more tobacco companies try to act responsibly and implement sustainable policies into every aspect of their business and production processes, the more scrutiny and unfair prosecutionthey seemingly experience. An even greater irony is that the only time Big Tobacco firms were ever left in peace was six or seven decades ago when most businesses in any industries cared very little about such concepts as consumer health or sustainability. Today, when the situation has improved so drastically by virtually any measure, it would serve various governments and oversight agencies well to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when pushing new policies, which can so easily become counterproductive.