Eco-Business A Big-Brand Takeover of Sustainability

McDonald's promises to use only beef, coffee, fish, chicken, and cooking oil obtainedfrom sustainable sources. Coca-Cola promises to achieve water neutrality. Unilever has set adeadline of 2020 to reach 100 percent sustainable agricultural sourcing. Walmart has pledged tobecome carbon neutral. Today, big-brand companies seem to be making commitments that go beyond theusual "greenwashing" efforts undertaken largely for public relations purposes. InEco-Business, Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister examine this new corporate embraceof sustainability, its actual accomplishments, and the consequences for the environment. For manyleading-brand companies, these corporate sustainability efforts go deep, reorienting centraloperations and extending through global supply chains. Yet, as Dauvergne and Lister point out, thesecompanies are doing this not for the good of the planet but for their own profits and market sharein a volatile, globalized economy. They are using sustainability as a business tool. Advocacy groupsand governments are partnering with these companies, eager to reap the governance potential ofeco-business efforts. But Dauvergne and Lister show that the acclaimed eco-efficiencies achieved bybig-brand companies limit the potential for finding deeper solutions to pressing environmentalproblems and reinforce runaway consumption. Eco-business promotes the sustainability of bigbusiness, not the sustainability of life on Earth.