The sustainability report at Dunmoggin Bulk Solutions has been missing since Tuesday, a state of affairs the company’s sustainability team describes as consistent with policy, if not with their job descriptions.
The 64-page document, which was completed in February, is understood to have been reviewed by Legal, Communications and a regional director, each of whom asked for it to be made less specific. By the final draft it reportedly consisted of a cover, a contents page and a sentence about the firm’s “ongoing journey”. It was then saved somewhere sensible, in the sense that nobody would think to look there.
The search so far
Helen Pargeter, the firm’s Sustainability Officer, began on the company intranet, where a search for “sustainability” returned no results. The term was quietly removed from the site in March, and the relevant page is now called “Our Approach to Things”. It has not been updated since it was renamed, and it does not contain an approach.
She then moved on to a shared drive called “Misc (OLD) FINAL”, which holds fourteen folders, one of which is called “Misc (OLD) FINAL (2)”. Ms Pargeter spent most of Wednesday in there and located two canteen menus, a photograph of a forklift and a spreadsheet titled “Targets (Do Not Circulate)”, which turned out to be a five-a-side rota.
“I want to be clear that I am not annoyed with anyone,” said Ms Pargeter. “We were told to keep it low-profile and we have done that very well. I would simply like to read it once, in private, to check we are still doing it.”
On Thursday she turned to the second-floor stationery cupboard, which is shared with Facilities and a ficus. Graham Whitlock, the firm’s Head of Facilities, said he had not seen the report but could confirm the cupboard contained a box of lanyards from a 2019 conference and a laminated sign reading “Think Before You Print”, which had been turned to face the wall.
“I assumed that was deliberate,” he said. “Somebody had gone to the trouble of turning it round, and in this building that usually means a decision has been made.”
A wider trend
Dunmoggin is among a growing number of businesses practising what analysts call greenhushing, in which companies stop publicising their climate targets and environmental progress for fear of being accused of greenwashing, attracting regulatory attention or becoming the subject of a political argument they had not planned to be in. It is distinct from doing nothing, although the two are difficult to tell apart from the outside, and increasingly from the inside.
Dr Rachel Fenwick, a senior lecturer in corporate governance, said the approach had a certain logic. “If you never say anything, nobody can say you said something untrue. The difficulty comes when the silence is so complete that the company itself loses track of what it hasn’t said. At that point you have not so much a strategy as a very quiet filing error.”
The company’s own staff appear to have adapted. A member of the finance team, who asked not to be named because he was not sure whether he was allowed to know about any of this, said he had been under the impression for some months that the firm had a sustainability team, but had never been given a reason to believe it.
Ms Pargeter is understood to be considering a final search of the car park, where a number of old pallets are stored under a tarpaulin, and a conversation with the regional director, who may have a copy but has not replied to her emails since the spring.
Asked whether the company could confirm that the report existed, Marcus Elliott, a spokesperson for Dunmoggin Bulk Solutions, said he could neither confirm nor deny it, and that this was in line with the firm’s commitments. “Dunmoggin remains deeply committed to something,” he said, “and will update stakeholders when it is safe to do so.”
