| Indirect costs of SDR |
b) Indirect costs of SDRDirect costs of SDR are trivial for large corporations yet, as shown in Table 1, fewer than 5% of those from advanced (OECD) countries issue such reports. At best (UK and Switzerland) SDR reporters are about a tenth of large corporations. This strongly suggests indirect costs, such as management time required to launch an SDR, are high. Roughly a third of those who have ever issued an SDR haven’t done so in the last three years. That suggests the problem is systemic and not just an initial learning curve.  Chart 1 suggests the problem is not corporate resistance to sustainability issues per se. Voluntary environmental standards from the International Standards Organization (e.g., ISO 14001) were introduced more recently than SDR yet are now implemented in over 80,000 facilities in OECD countries, exceeding the number of large corporations in those countries partly because many have more than one facility but also because many smaller companies adopt ISO 14001. Moreover, OconEco’s catalog of companies in one or more sustainability network suggests that only about a fifth of these companies issue SDR. OconEco views these as symptoms of inefficient information systems rather than recalcitrant businesses.Continue Reading Costs of SDR > Direct cost of SDR > Indirect costs of SDR
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