ESG: Taking the Temperature of
Corporate Health
Environmental
A company's impact on the natural environment, including workplace and community health.
Social
A company's impact on people, including its relationships with employees, customers, and the broader community.
Governance
A company's leadership, structure, accountability, fairness, and diversity policies.
e-Stewards: ESG in Action
ESG has always been at the root of e-Stewards.
Before e-Stewards’ inception, the creator of e-Stewards, Basel Action Network (BAN), identified and denounced the dumping of hazardous e-waste on people and environments in developing countries as an e-waste horror show. But BAN went beyond the usual advocacy actions of protest: we created a tool of accountability to solve the problem.
That tool is the e-Stewards Certification Program.
e-Stewards: An ESG tool for Recyclers and their Customers
E: Environmental Benefits
e-Stewards Standard: Those certified to the e-Stewards Standard for Ethical and Responsible Reuse, Recycling, and Disposition of Electronics Equipment and Information Technology already document key indicators of ESG criteria including:
- Stewardship Management System (SMS)
- Stewardship Policy & Objectives
- Risk Assessment of all Operations
- Identification List of all Stewardship Aspects
- Listing of all Compliance Obligations
The e-Stewards Standard requires best practices for proper environmentally sound management, legal compliance, downstream due diligence, while instilling principles embodied by the waste management hierarchy, the precautionary principle and life-cycle perspective.
e-Stewards Global Impact Calculator: The e-Stewards calculator tool is designed to estimate some of the key environmental benefits of recycling your electronic waste with e-Stewards Certified processors. The benefits are measured in three critical areas: 1) Greenhouse gas avoidance, 2) Toxic metals diverted from export, dumping, or disposal, and 3) valuable metals diverted from landfill or disposal
This calculator is available on the Apple App Store.
S: Social Benefits and Adjunct Programs
NAID AAA Certified Data Security and Privacy Protection: To ensure client privacy is fully protected, e-Stewards requires all data be destroyed in accordance with the NAID AAA Certification — a prerequisite for all e-Stewards Processor operations.
Occupational Safety and Health: e-Stewards processors are required to provide extra precautions in industrial hygiene for hazardous technologies in the recycling field such as shredders and compactors.
Digital Equity/Inclusion: e-Stewards has pioneered social impact programs in Digital Inclusion that have been adopted by many e-Stewards organizations that provide low-income and marginalized communities with access to the digital world at low cost.
Workforce Inclusion: Further, we have created a unique recycling employment engagement program for disabled individuals known as ADVANCE+. More can be learned about ADVANCE+ [here.]
G: Governance Benefits
Thorough Audits: Accountability begins with our Standard and the auditors that audit to it at least once yearly.
EarthEye Tracking: e-Stewards pioneered GPS tracking to enhance due diligence and transparency. This technology is used routinely and randomly to verify performance of our e-Stewards processors, but can also be purchased separately by e-Stewards Processors and e-Stewards Enterprises to augment their own due diligence programs.
Unannounced Inspections: e-Stewards uniquely performs random unannounced inspections on their Certified processors to verify performance and assure greater accountability.
Critical non-Conformity Policy: e-Stewards uniquely applies a critical non-conformity policy that allows for the program to dismiss egregious willful violators of the e-Stewards Standard.
Downstream Due Diligence: e-Stewards Processors must ensure that the e-Stewards Standard is applied for all Materials of Concern through each downstream tier of management to final disposition.