Greenwashed: Cargill Snags ISO Environmental Certification

Everyone wants to be green, and these days it seems like anyone can.  We recently saw Fiji attempt to advertise itself as sustainable, and now, having just received environmental certification from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Cargill is projecting an image of itself as an environmental steward.

Before we dole out our praise, let’s review a few of Cargill‚ other claims to fame:

• In the past decade, Cargill has managed to spill toxic waste into San Francisco Bay and nearby marshes six times.
• Emissions from its processing plants have violated the Clean Air Act.
• By expanding production in Latin America, Cargill has destroyed acres of valuable rainforest.

So what are we to make of this environmental certification?  It turns out that it means very little in terms of the corporation‚ overall environmental impact.  According to the ISO website, the standard that Cargill met (ISO 14001) “does not itself state specific environmental performance criteria.”  Instead, it establishes requirements for an environmental management system that “applies to those environmental aspects which an organization identifies as those which it can control and those which it can influence.”  Cargill gets to choose the issues that it thinks it should work to improve, and as long as it works on them it is up to par and gets a pat on the back.

In a press release, Cargill Meat Solutions president Bill Rupp proudly states that the certification “allows us to assess what we’re doing so we can continuously improve.”  Let’s hope that this is true and that they take advantage of it, because Cargill has a lot of room for improvement before it can honestly qualify as an environmental steward.