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.