Providing strategic advice and market insights for optimizing manufacturing relationships and achieving profitable environmental strategies to clients in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia since 1987.Our long-time TFI Best of Blogs followers may remember a 2009 post comparing the cycle of local to global to local “manufacturing” in the food industry with that in the electronics industry. Today we correlate the food and electronics industries again, but this time foreshadowing a threat to the latter.
Michele Simon’s book Appetite for Profit exposes the public to appalling practices in the food industry that impair the health of children, adults, our economy, and the planet. Simon freely names dozens of examples of restaurant chains, packaged-food companies, and conglomerates that lie about food content, shield the public from vital health information, and prey with misleading marketing on those most vulnerable to ill-health from bad food–children and the poor.
As I read Simon’s book, I couldn’t help but realize that this food-industry exposé foreshadows a similar threat to the electronics sector. Industry after industry is being targetted by journalists, authors, attorneys, regulators, NGOs, and customer groups, revealing harmful practices and being entreated to disclose product and process truths. (Do you remember marketing campaigns about “clean coal”? See this report.)
A recent “pain” experienced by the food industry was from a USA law requiring restaurant chains to list on their menus nutritional information, including caloric content. This forced restaurants to disclose some appalling high calorie counts and – as was expected – restaurants have been finding ways to reduce those calories.
Yes, the electronics industry is already pressured by NGOs from the Electronics TakeBack Coalition to GreenPeace (company ratings), and subject to substance-disclosure regulation from the EU to the USA SEC (for conflict minerals). But this is just the beginning of citizens, enlightened corporate customers, and organizations demanding that the electronics industry present independently audited supply-chain information on worker conditions, manufacturing processes, and product content to the individual substance level.
Besides, there are compelling economic reasons for electronics companies to know exactly what’s in their products, even though it has gotten more and more difficult to have full visibility to bills of materials based on OEMs outsourcing design and manufacturing.
Do you agree that the electronics industry would benefit from learning the hard lessons experienced in the food, energy, and other industries, and proactively disclosing and improving its products’ substances and its worker and environmental practices? Or does the electronics industry prefer to have its hand forced? We welcome you to post a comment.
Tags: nutritional laws, substance disclosure, worker conditions
Hi Pam,
A very important post. I took a look over at Appetite For Profit and got sick to my stomach, frankly.
At the end of the day, corporations struggle with the tension between “maximizing return to shareholders” and “for the good of the commons”. I think they should struggle more, not less. The rules of corporate governance, and the regulatory laws of commerce, should play a stronger role in preserving the common good.
How odd (and wrong) that truth gets caught, twisted, and lost in the process of making money. Should there be a law that says corporations can’t lie? (Shouldn’t there be a law that says news organizations can’t lie?). If regulations are required, it seems to me that simply telling the truth should be among them.
When a company sacrifices the truth in the name of market penetration or profit, it’s not a sustainable game. It corrupts and exploits the very fabric of the market in which it operates.
Someday, we’ll (have no choice but to) realize that “that which is unsustainable will not be sustained”, and hopefully focus our energies on truly sustainable, “LIFECYCLE sustainable” behavior. Whether electronics or food, ask how our 7th-generation dependents will view our behavior.
I think it would be great if there was full disclosure. Whenever an industry balks at this it makes me wonder what they have to hide and actually makes me more concerned about their products. I’m sure I can’t be the only consumer that thinks this way!
I have a hard time comparing these two industries. The food we ingest is going to have much more of an effect on our health than trace amounts of elements in the products we use. Hence the food industry should justifiably be held to the highest standards. Electronic components like many products are produced using a myriad of hazardous chemicals and processes because it is the only way it can be done not because there is any intent to harm the planet.
The world can neither live without these components nor can it afford to pay more for them. Forget iPhones, iPads and the countless other products that utilize these products, the world we know cannot run without these products.
There are tradeoffs in everything. Since coal was mentioned, we cannot presently live without it and half of Europe in a knee jerk reaction to the Japan tragedy are about to start burning a lot more of it. Solar power requires the use of battery production which in many cases is another environmentally unfriendly process. The list is endless.
And of course it comes down to money as everything does. Journalists, the green movement and others looking for the exposé frequently fail to take that into account. When its costs more to produce goods whether it be electronics, food or energy, the consumer eventually pays. Just another tradeoff I suppose. This is hardly palatable in the current or any other economic period.