I’m quick to applaud when companies “go green.†But I’ve been struck lately by the fact that it takes a lot more than the greening of big business to solve our environmental problems.
The latest example: Enterprise Rent-A-Car. More than the logo at Enterprise is green. The world’s biggest rental car company (its brands include Alamo and National, as well as Enterprise) has developed an environmental stewardship program that is thoughtful and wide-ranging, encompassing the kinds of cars and fuel that the company buys, the way it encourages customers to offset their carbon emissions and its donations to a big tree-planting project and to fuels research. Enterprise is an admirable, very successful family-owned company. (My FORTUNE colleague Carol Loomis wrote a great story last year about Enterprise. Fun fact—it hires more new college graduates than any other company in the U.S.)
But I argue in today’s Sustainability column that there are real limits to what even a big and well-intentioned company like Enterprise can do. Here’s how the column begins:
Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the nation’s largest rental car company, wants to become a better steward of the environment. Its efforts demonstrate the limits to how much – and how little – one company can do.
To its credit, Enterprise offers the world’s largest fleet of fuel- efficient cars, including more than 440,000 vehicles that get better than 28 miles per gallon on the highway. About 5,000 of those are hybrid electric cars and another 73,000 are “flex-fuel” vehicles that can run on E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gas. The company has also pledged to plant 50 million trees in America’s national forests and this month began inviting customers to offset the carbon emissions of their rental cars.
As a family-owned company that expects to generate revenues this year of more than $12 billion, Enterprise is well positioned to have an impact. It’s got a strong commitment, ample scale – its tree planting initiative is the equivalent of planting the trees in New York’s Central Park every 10 days for the next 50 years – and plenty of patience.
You can read the rest here.
Hi Marc:
The steps you report Enterprise is taking are all good things, and that’s important. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that a company’s sustainability performance is a measure not so much of what it’s products make possible in its customers’ behaviors, but of what its OWN performance happens to be. After all, it is not a company’s job to do its customers’ job, and vice versa.
Everything Enterprise is doing to make it possible for us, its customers, to live more sustainable lives is appreciated, but what about Enterprise’s own behaviors? Or any other company’s, for that matter? I hear everything you are saying about Enterprise’s inability to have the full impact it would like to have for one reason or another, but what about the fact that the company has not yet even bothered to publish a sustainability report concerning its own operations? Does the fact that Toyota can’t keep up with Enterprise’s requests for more hybrid vehicles (or so they say) substitute in some way for Eneterprise’s failure to do that? What is the sustainability of Enterprise’s operations, anyway? Who knows.
What we have going on here over and over in the press is a confusion between a company’s own sustainability performance and the effects its products may or may not have on the sustainability performance of its customers. As long as you and others keep confusing the two, I will keep pointing it out.
Regards,
Mark
PS – Please feel free to include this comment in your print copy.
I’m a big fan of green companies and am always intrigued to see how many ways energy and resources can be saved when individuals or companies are attentive. However green a car company is, though, kind of misses the point. We need to be expanding mass transit and other more efficient transports. cars, even energy efficient ones, are essentially consuming huge amounts of resources and fossil fuels to move humans who weigh 100-200 pounds. Doesn’t make good sense, really.