Story by Myriam Beaugé

Mastering the art of sustainability presents as many opportunities as challenges for shopping centres

The last weekend of November marks an important shift in the operation of European shopping centres. It’s when marketers begin to perform some of their best tricks for consumers in anticipation of the most lucrative time of year—the Christmas trading season. But outside shopping centre entrances and high-street shops, environmental activists present a few tricks of their own, trying to inspire consumers to honour another kind of tradition: Buy Nothing Day.
Launched by Adbusters in 1993, Buy Nothing Day is held annually on the last Saturday of November in 55 countries around the globe (in Canada and the US, the campaign falls on the Friday after American Thanksgiving) and it challenges people to "switch off from shopping and tune into life", exposing the environmental and ethical consequences of consumerism. This, just when many centres are holding light switch-on ceremonies to encourage customers to visit often and buy more in the run-up to Christmas.
With stunts that include parking Santa and his elves in front of popular shopping destinations to distribute empty Christmas giftboxes, Buy Nothing Day brings to light the need to embrace sustainability, an issue of growing concern for Europe’s shopping centre industry.
After decades of equating high quality of life with compulsive consumption of goods and natural resources, the way the sector envisions, measures and achieves success is changing.
From visual branding that once involved the abundant use of materials, to promotional speech that was routinely punctuated with words like ‘more’ and ‘bigger’, old habits are slowly but surely being broken, as marketers learn new tricks that are better suited to the realities of doing business in the 21st Century. And that change is occurring not a moment too soon.
Just ask the 600 authors originating from 40 countries who collaborated on putting together Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, the fourth assessment report produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and whose detailed findings will be released on 6th April during a press conference held at the European Commission offices in Brussels—IPCC is run jointly by the United Nations Environmental Programme and the World Meteorological Organization.
As one could expect, much of the report’s summary presented this past January focuses on the acceleration of global warming and its effect on the planet, namely a change in precipitation amounts, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather in every corner of the globe—think of the Tsunami in southeast Asia and Katrina in the US.
The main culprit is an increase in greenhouse gases, including CO2 which we produce when we burn fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.
Given our heavy reliance on such fuels to maintain our current lifestyles, only a radical change can even slow down the warming process, let alone reverse it.
With so much money invested in retail projects across Europe, it’s in the shopping centre industry’s best interest, and indeed its responsibility, to go the path of sustainability, in terms of environmental protection, ethical business management and social awareness.
In 2004/2005, UK-based PRUPIM undertook a major re-evaluation of its approach to corporate responsibility (CR), creating a strategic overlay across eight areas: business conduct, procurement, construction, investment, property management, community investment, communication and corporate culture.
One of PRUPIM’s most successful CR initiatives is Prudential Grass Roots, a partnership between conservation charity BTCV, PRUPIM and Prudential plc. Launched in 2001, the award-winning scheme helps to drive regeneration for people and wildlife in communities around shopping centres and business parks invested in by Prudential plc and managed by PRUPIM.
Manchester Arndale’s Grass Roots initiative transformed 70 acres of under-developed open space in Levenshulme into a wildlife-rich variety of habitats with a network of footpaths and a picnic area. The Highfield Country park transformation was an integral part of the centre’s £150-million (€220.5 million) redevelopment.
The project involved several groups, including BTCV, Prudential plc, Friends of Highfield Country Park, Bovis Lend Lease (the centre's main contractor), Manchester City Council and local residents. PRUPIM says the project was so successful that Manchester Arndale launched a second phase in May 2006, called Youth Roots. The project, which is partly funded by the Department for Communities and local government, engages children and young adults between the ages of seven and 24 to carry out regeneration projects, including footpath clearance, pond work, managing wildflower meadows and mapping new pathways.
"PRUPIM believes that corporate partnerships can play a key role in creating cleaner, greener and safer communities" said Paul Cornes, CR director.
Last October, Prudential plc, through PRUPIM, renewed its support of BTCV’s Spring into Action volunteer recruitment campaign (www.btcv.org/springintoaction) for another two years.
Spring into Action, which is also supported by the Cabinet Office and fronted by BBC Ground Force’s Charlie Dimmock, gives local citizens a chance to look after their environment. This year, from 1st May to 7th June, more than one thousand conservation events will be held across the UK—from tree planting and dry stone walling to footpath construction and creating wildlife habitats.
PRUPIM is backing the programme’s launch, which will comprise of activities such as workshops where children will make bird feeders and insect houses, join in BTCV’s Wildflower identification quiz and learn about ways they can make a difference to British wildlife.
Sustainable environmental change will be further encouraged by the BTCV-managed Prudential Grass Roots Small Grants Programme for local community groups throughout the UK.
France’s Centre Commercial St. Martial in the Limousin region put its CR plan in action last 10th to 13th October, when it hosted the regional delegation of ADEME, the French agency for environment and energy management.
The collaboration marked the national Reduce Waste Week and the ADEME stand enabled visitors to peruse the France Nature Environment Expo, whose theme was "Less Garbage for Future Generations", and witness a comparison of various consumer goods to see how they were produced.
St. Martial also hosted information stations where children could view the animated film Woops, The Planet’s Guardian Angels to learn ways in which to act every day in favour of the environment, and play Ecoville, an online simulation game in which players get to build their own city in such a way that it can develop in harmony with the
environment.
It’s this kind of interactivity that Telford Shopping Centre in Shropshire, UK, will be striving to achieve when it launches its new Green Club for children this spring with the help of Liz Hollingshead from Design 4 Education.
The Green Club will host workshops with an environmental focus, such as growing seeds, planting flower beds and recycling clothes. Hollingshead said she is making sure the club, which will work in collaboration with the local horticulture college, is managed in accordance with sustainability principles. That means the materials the children will use will be carefully sourced.
Hollingshead has already found a supplier of tables and chairs which are made from recycled cardboard and fold down for easy storage. She says the furniture could be used for a Green Club competition in which members are required to come up with their own design and then paint one of the chairs or tables.
In 2006, the Association of Charity Shops launched a three-year green programme of its own in the UK’s Anglia region, in partnership with the Cambridge and Essex community Reuse and Recycling Networks. Dubbed Choose2Reuse, the campaign was held in five shopping centres this past January—Harpur Centre, Grafton Centre, Harlequin Shopping Centre, Buttermarket Shopping Centre and High Chelmer Shopping Centre—as well as at The Forum cultural centre.
From 15th through 26th January, the centres took turns hosting a Green Santa event, during which shoppers brought in donations resulting from unwanted, duplicate and replacement gifts, or sale purchases. The events included a press call and the Association supported them well with ‘Stop, Look, Buy’ and ‘Donate It!’ posters, and Reuse Champions Information Packs, among other collaterals.
While such initiatives are not typical for retail, they are a good marketing fit for shopping centres concerned with sustainability.
"It is our belief that no economic activity can take place in a vacuum, somehow unconnected to people or the planet," said Elsa Monteiro, a strong advocate for sustainability in her role as the head of institutional relations, environment and communication at Sonae Sierra, based in Portugal.
"On the contrary, doing business involves a constant evaluation of the interaction between economic, social and environmental objectives, and business success requires a balance of all three. That’s why we took a fundamental step forward, the creation of a corporate responsibility policy that represents our commitment in this area."
For several years, Sonae Sierra has been a member of the Property Environment Group, a forum of companies, most of them UK-based, seeking to share experiences and challenges in the area of sustainable property development and management.
Monteiro says the Forum has stimulated further commitments, motivating its participants to implement some far-reaching, good practice environmental initiatives.
Several of Sonae Sierra’s shopping centres in Portugal and Spain have already obtained ISO 140001 certification, a standard that requires the most demanding levels of environmental management in areas such as energy savings, water quality and consumption, the monitoring of air quality and the selective separation and recycling of waste materials. One of the company’s strategic goals is to obtain environmental certification for all its shopping and leisure centres under operation by the end of 2008.
Members of the Forum are certainly early adopters in that respect. Only recently has sustainability begun to appear as a recurring entry in shopping centres’ financial records and corporate reports, and for marketers the issue of sustainability remains a challenging one.
In an industry that has, for the most part, adopted the ‘customer is always right’ approach to management, it takes clear corporate vision to see beyond current consumer demand and anticipate what shoppers will be expecting in the future.
As of now, consumers aren’t exactly clamouring for more sustainable management at their local shopping centre or favourite high-street shop.
"We believe for now sustainability is not yet a discerning factor for consumers when they choose where to shop, but the awareness of this theme is growing. On the other hand, other stakeholders of the company, like banks, investors or municipalities, are very interested in sustainability," Monteiro said.
"We consider that our CR management system is a competitive advantage in our sector [and] having in place an environment management system not only will help us be more eco-efficient, but it is an opportunity to [serve] environmentally sensitive customers."
At Germany’s Institut für Gewerbezentren, an independent research and consulting institution based in Starnberg, Momme Torsten Falk says in his country the public is ecology-minded and therefore embracing sustainability is an image factor for shopping centres. However, Falk believes that price remains the dominant discerning factor in choosing where to shop—one exception is the food category, in which consumers increasingly seek out organic produce and good quality products.
On the social side of CR, PRUPIM is not only keeping a close eye on its operations, but it also supports employees in their own personal pursuits of sustainability.
A staff volunteering scheme allows employees to take up to two days of company time each year for community projects of their choice. Another initiative, Payroll Giving, is tax-free charitable giving direct from an employee’s salary, and PRUPIM employees can voluntarily join the Give As You Earn (GAYE) scheme. The company also offers support to local charitable organisations through the free use of its meeting rooms and office space, as is the case at Cwmbran Shopping Centre in Wales, where a local charity uses the PRUPIM office to provide retail training to the long-term unemployed.
The scheme is just one of the many initiatives that shopping centres are implementing to ensure a more sustainable future for themselves and their shoppers. But Falk cautions marketers against adopting a sustainability identity without the substance to back it up.
"A green image will be very important in the future. PR and marketing can assist to build this image, but the statements must be true and traceable," he said.
Monteiro considers that kind of scrutiny to be essential.
"At Sonae, we’ve been publishing since 2004 a CR Report where we show our performance against the targets set by the company. We believe it is crucial to be transparent in the communication of our objectives and results. At the same time, it’s also important to build brand equity," she explained.
"Like all brand attributes, you have to deliver what you promise to your stakeholders in order to be taken seriously."
True success will come when shopping centres no longer have to fear the PR antics of Buy Nothing Day, and when marketers’ tricks are used as pathways to achieving a sustainable, profitable future.