With its waste-generating business model, can the credibility of David Jones’ reporting on its environmental record withstand social scrutiny?

David Jones displays the hallmarks of a 20th century retail business trying to divert attention from the real impact of its business on the environment. Like the banks, the unacceptable effects of its trade are many, many orders of magnitude greater than the cost to the environment of the operation of its outlets.

It is, however, easier to walk away from David Jones, and until it really grapples with its impact and comes clean about the elephant in its display space, once alerted to the environmental shortcomings of its business model, many customers may indeed willingly entertain that possibility.

The David Jones model compels it to stock the products of well-known brands, enhance perceptions through their display and keep as much stuff ringing its cash registers as the constraints of competition and consumption will allow.

It relies on everything it sells ultimately ending in landfill, and people coming back for more. Worse, at the peak points in the annual cycle of retail-driven consumption (Christmas, Easter and parents’ days), an even greater volume of more excessively over-packaged stuff passes through its outlets to the same end destination.

To those with a mind to do so, David Jones may be an attractive place to shop, but like the Royal Family’s, its waste is no better than that of any other.

So, let’s confront the unmentionable David Jones elephant. That the company should report on its environmental undertakings is no bad thing, but that it undertakes its reporting so disingenuously as not to address the impacts of the products it sells is to do so in bad faith. Such reporting is not the action of a company deserving of trust.

If it is to “[develop and implement an environment strategy guided by the principle of meeting] the changing expectations of our stakeholders”, it can not plausibly do so without first knowing, and then relating to its customers and community, the identified sustainability credentials of those others upstream in its respective supply chains from which it buys.

Its credibility is further dependent on the transparency with which it both reports, and exercises, product-selection processes supportive of such declarations.

But of course, the likelihood that we will ever see such a statement is near-zero and that there is no mention of either anywhere in its “environment report” makes public disclosure of this patent management vulnerability on this subject all the more important. And that is so whether you are a customer, an investor, a banker or insurer, or simply a stakeholder (that’s everyone else, by the way) to the company.

Instead, of course, the company prides itself on offering a range of quasi-“luxury” brands, none of whose goods’ provenance features anywhere in its report.

If that’s an environmentally sustainable way of conducting an enterprise, then you’d have to ask on the basis of which of its directors’ or senior managers’ particular academic journeys David Jones has come to the decision it is. Perhaps academia has simply got it all wrong.

At the point of writing, the environment appears to be David Jones’ inconvenient truth as it gets no visible run on the company’s web site. So clearly marked is its omission that it appears management has decreed it too plainly obstructive, potentially, to its continued upward profit trajectory.

Inspection of the relevant sections of its annual reports for 2008 and 2209 prove similarly unedifying in their espousal only of worthy management efforts in minimising those wastes that are within its easy grasp, but which fail truth and serve to benefit only the company, without reaching for any higher aspiration.

At a time of visible managerial disarray, the last thing David Jones management needs is a candle held to its feet for the critical omissions from its reporting on its environmental impacts, but here are some short observations on which we can develop further our open critique.

1. Environment at David Jones is a matter of compliance, not of opportunity.
2. Simple hygiene factors such as the existence of an independently certified ISO14001-certified environmental system are absent of mention in its reports, from which, without further evidence, we can probably assume that such certification doesn’t exist.
3. No director has his or her name on this section of the report as a mark of ownership, pride, honour or responsibility. Thus, no indvidual can be held publicly to account.
4. Statements that its environmental conduct accords with changing community standards are baseless: who did it ask, when and how? Evidence please.
5. Why is business model innovation not mentioned in connection with environmental improvements? Perpetuating the same old model without radical readjustment in the climate-change age can only repeat the same negative environmental result year in, year out.
6. Where are the real barriers to sustainability at David Jones? Are they cultural? Can its present management really adapt to changing circumstances and real community expectations? Does its board understand even what they are and where they are coming from?

There is no magic, delight or imagination on view here in David Jones’ statement of its attitude to our most-prized natural assets, so customers and shareholders should act on and beware the consequences of its actions.

Until this company starts changing its disclosures on its contributions to the depletion of the environment and climate such that they accord with reality and not its board’s highly selective perceptions of “stakeholder expectations”, we can, and should have little faith in its reporting.

Bring on the social investigation and let the questions begin.