DIVING INTO A FAMILY COMPANY’S FIRST SUSTAINABILITY REPORT
Abstract
FPI, a family-run and business-to-business packaging company based in the southern
United States, is planning to produce its first corporate sustainability report. Several
steps are involved in creating a sustainability report, starting with a materiality
assessment to determine which topics should be benchmarked, monitored, and included
in the report. The goal of the assessment is to incorporate perspectives from both
internal and external stakeholders of the organization to create a materiality matrix
that maps the importance of various topics in a visual, user-friendly, and quantitative
manner. This ensures that the topics that are included in the sustainability report
are in fact significant, or material, to the organization’s internal and external
stakeholders. The materiality assessment is followed by interviews with leadership
to gather qualitative data on near-term sustainability priorities; this step was initiated
with interview from five leaders in separate divisions within the company. Based on
the survey, these are the top ten suggested priority topics ranked in order of importance:
Waste, Workplace Culture, Consumer Health and Safety, Local Communities, Water, Agriculture/Biodiversity,
Climate Change, Occupational Health and Safety, Energy, and Supply Chain. This work
formalizes FPI’s concern for the environment and interest in improving its sustainable
business practices.
Type
Master's projectSubject
business and environmentsustainability report
materiality
materiality assessment
materiality matrix
corporate sustainability
packaging
family company
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15849Citation
Charania, Haseena (2017). DIVING INTO A FAMILY COMPANY’S FIRST SUSTAINABILITY REPORT. Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15849.Collections
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