Almost every industry has an impact on the environment, and rarely is it positive. From the overexploitation of natural resources to the pollution of air, water, and soil, the era of globalized economics is also the era of globalized deforestation, water shortage, spiking cancer rates, and mass extinctions.
Enbridge, operator of the world’s largest crude oil pipeline system, focuses on carrying petroleum from Western Canada—including the notorious tar sand fields of Alberta—to refineries in Ontario and the U.S. Midwest. It and its affiliates have other pipelines in several parts of Canada and United States and operate Canada’s largest natural gas distribution company. In July 2010 the company’s U.S. subsidiary Enbridge Energy Partners L.P.
For most of its eight-decade history, Nalco has quietly gone about its business of producing specialty chemicals for water treatment and industrial processes. It had a higher profile in the 1970s when it challenged federal efforts to phase out the use of lead in gasoline and one of its subsidiaries was charged with botching the safety testing of drugs and chemicals.
Massey Energy is one of the largest coal companies in the United States, and certainly one of the most controversial. In April 2010 the company received a great deal of negative attention when an explosion at one of its mines in West Virginia killed 29 workers. It later came out that the mine in question had been cited more than 1,000 times for safety violations, and that Massey had similar problems at many of its other facilities.
BP (formerly British Petroleum) has become one of the world’s most controversial giant corporations because of its involvement in a series of major environmental and industrial accidents. The company has been the target of intense criticism for its role in the April 2010 explosion at a drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers and caused an underwater leak that has spewed millions of gallons of crude oil into the ocean, creating the most serious environmental disaster in U.S. history.
Chevron, once part of the Standard Oil empire, has grown over the past quarter century into the world’s fourth largest petroleum company, thanks to a series of ambitious acquisitions: Gulf Oil in 1984, Texaco in 2001 and Unocal in 2005. The purchase of Texaco brought with it a massive environmental lawsuit that has dragged on for more than a decade. This is only one of a host of controversies surrounding Chevron’s environmental and human rights record around the world.
A sarcastic poke at the management culture of BP and how they deal with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in U.S. Gulf region.
Anadarko Petroleum has used internal expansion and bold acquisitions to become one of the largest independent oil and gas exploration and production companies in the world. In 2010 it found itself caught up in controversies stemming from an oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, both because it is a minority (25%) owner of the BP well involved and because its own deepwater drilling operations are among those now viewed as being very risky.
The JSW Group is a $3.7 billion worth conglomerate with interests in steel, energy, minerals and mining, aluminium, infrastructure and logistics, cement and IT. The Group projects its power sector company, JSW Energy, as one of its companies to watch out for. JSW's projects, notably its power plants in Jaigad, in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra, and its plans to set up aluminium smelters and mines in the tribal tracts of Andhra Pradesh have attracted significant resistance from local communities, including farmers.
The Madras Aluminium Company Ltd. (MALCO) is part of Vedanta Resources, a London listed metals and mining major with Aluminium, Copper and Zinc operations in UK, India and Australia. MALCO is a primary Aluminium producer in South India with operations encompassing mining, refining, smelting and power generation.
How has corporate social responsibility developed in the mobile phone industry in recent years and are social and environmental standards improving as fast as the product applications? This briefing will include a follow up on the ‘High Cost of Calling: Critical Issues in the Mobile Phone Industry’ report4, with the focus mainly on sourcing policies and practices and supply chain responsibility of the major brand companies.
