News, Social Responsibility

ESG: Environmental, Social and Governance

Introduction

“ESG” has become a hot topic in recent years. You have probably heard or seen the term “ESG” on either news or newspaper. However, do you really understand its meaning? ESG is the abbreviation of Environmental, Social and Governance. It is an important indicator to evaluate whether an enterprise can achieve corporate sustainability. When making investment decisions, many clients and investors will take an enterprise’s ESG performance into account. In order to enhance the global competitiveness, listed companies should make improvements in all possible aspects to gain a good ESG grade so as to earn the trust from global investors.

ESG criteria

Let’s learn a bit more about these three aspects. For the environmental aspect, enterprises will be examined if they value environmental friendliness and sustainability. For the social aspect, the main focus is on “people”. For instance, fairness of labour relation, safety of working environment, whether the enterprise has done anything to help the minority of the society. For the governance aspect, it will emphasize on the internal management of the enterprise, such as financial stability, accounting transparency and corporate ethics.

Concrete actions

You might be wondering what enterprises could practically do to improve their ESG grade? There are thousands of actions that enterprises could take, it is hard to list them all. Let’s start from the packaging. Making a change on the packaging could significantly ameliorate the grade of the environmental aspect. The first idea comes into the minds of most of us would be reducing unnecessary packaging and hence the waste produced. However, considering the brand image and the necessity of product protection, it is never easy to cut the product packaging. Instead, enterprises could use recycled or decomposable materials, such as sugarcane and corn materiel (PLA), or else, FSC paper.

Corporate examples

Let’s further explore how enterprises could work harder on ESG. Lots of enterprises are dedicated to reducing carbon footprint and switching to renewable energy, aiming to achieve the goal of zero net carbon emission. Besides the above examples targeting to raise the environmental grade, enterprises may also boost the social and governance grade through strengthening the safeguard of employee rights, improving the transparency of salary calculation and accounting system, and enhancing the attention of corporate ethics. 

Conclusion

Did you get any inspiration from our content above? If you are interested in raising your ESG grade from improving the product packaging, please do not hesitate to contact us, we are more than happy to help!

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