Companies see sustainability as an expense

Kantar Polska, on behalf of BASF Polska, surveyed how sustainability ranks on the agendas of Polish business and how companies are doing in preparing to implement ESG principles.

'The guiding objective of our survey of 150 industrial, mainly manufacturing, companies was to make the issue more real. Because sustainability is being talked about by more and more people, we wanted to verify what business practice looks like,' said Katarzyna Zalewska, Head of Sustainability Expertise at Kantar.

The report shows that the optics of companies are very different; the size of the company influences the beliefs of its management about the business dimension of sustainability and ESG. ‘This topic arouses a lot of emotion, it is not always a positive sentiment towards this issue, but there is always a discernible position, an opinion,' said Zalewska.

What do companies think about ESG?

'Many sustainability-related activities and strategies, like many Green Deal provisions and assumptions, are currently under tremendous pressure due to the energy and geopolitical crises. And this is felt in many of the responses from participants in our joint report,' said Katarzyna Jedynak, Head of Sales Industrial Chemicals, BASF Poland. However, what is positive, in her opinion, is that there is no departure from the assumptions of a sustainable future in declarations and actions.

'What can you see from a bird's eye view of the market? Where are we in terms of adopting sustainability policies?' asked Dorota Cudna-Sławińska, board member of Kantar Polska. In the survey, as many as 83% of companies declare that they generally consider sustainability issues in their business operations. But, as the researchers noted, the devil is in the detail, which can be seen when confronting declarations with practice. According to the survey, despite the declared consideration of ESG by four-fifths of respondents, only 30% are in the process of developing (20%) or already have (10%) sustainability strategies.

'As many as 40% of our respondents, regardless of the size of their company, said that they do not have such a strategy and that they do not plan to have one,' said Dorota Cudna-Sławińska.

Part of the tension around sustainability stems from the fact that the Green Deal was invented for a world that has changed a lot since then. 'The Green Deal was introduced in 2019, the world looked very different then, no one expected a pandemic and a war in Ukraine. Today it is still the same as when it was introduced five years ago, nothing has changed. It is hard to blame people for their critical opinions. In my opinion, while trying to introduce the Green Deal, politicians have forgotten that there are people along the way who need to accept it, understand it and implement it,' commented Katarzyna Byczkowska, managing director of BASF Poland.

Companies also view ESG as an unnecessary burden and expense. The researchers presented statements from companies that best reflected the prevailing mood in Polish business: ‘We don't plan to measure our carbon footprint because we have nothing to do with coal,’ says the quoted environmental specialist at a metallurgical company.

'21% of representatives say they see nothing good in ESG, they do not see any benefit from implementing sustainability in their companies,' said Katarzyna Zalewska. This group is larger than the figures above suggest, because when you add in those who answered ‘don't know’, the proportion of respondents not seeing any benefit rises to 40%.

'Four in ten manufacturing companies see nothing good for themselves from implementing ESG standards. The results were all the more worrying because our interviewees were decision-makers in companies,' emphasised the Head of Sustainability Expertise at Kantar.