Emily Margitan's Comm 101 Blog

I was recently reading a Babbage blog post on The Economist website named “The Isle of Green“. This blog post was very interesting because it was a good example of the values that were discussed in Comm 101 class 14 – CSR & Sustainability. The Isle of Wight is a 380 square km island to the south of Britain which has relied on the mainland for its resources. This island has 140 000 inhabitants but over the holidays months or during its music festival it experiences an influx of tourists. EcoIsland, a sustainability group plans to have the island be economically sustainable and completely self sufficient. It’s chief executive, David Green (people do take after their names) confirms this by saying that the projects goal “is for the community to put its destiny into its own hands and build a self-sufficient future by integrating green technologies”. EcoIsland already being supported by large corporations such as IBM and Toshiba. So far $315 million has been raised to fund this project. If all goes according to plan, by 2020 the Isle of Wight will have the smallest environmental footprint in England.

In class we talked about how sustainability is a key factor for companies’ brand image, the Isle of Wight can be thought of as a company because it relies on the help from other companies to reach its goal just like companies rely on investors for help in achieving goals. We learned that in most companies the decision to pay attention to sustainability often comes from within. This is the case on the Isle of Wight because the small businesses on the island were part of the reason why this sustainability initiative was launched.