Western Pa. CEOs want to improve environment, quality of life

Western Pennsylvania's CEOs need not rely on cues from Washington when it comes to doing their part to protect and improve the environment, the head of a global plastics supplier said Tuesday.

“Government is not going to lead this,” Jerry MacCleary, president and CEO of Covestro LLC in North America, emphasized during a gathering of business executives and nonprofit partners at the Fairmont Pittsburgh hotel, Downtown. “Industry is going to lead it and companies and CEOs like us are going to lead this.”

MacCleary, a native Pittsburgher, has joined 16 fellow top executives on a new coalition charged with improving this region's quality of life through business practices — and encouraging more employers to do the same.

The council — dubbed “CEOs for Sustainability” — aims to accelerate the pace at which greater Pittsburgh's businesses prioritize efforts such reducing energy consumption, minimizing waste and pollution and cultivating environmentally minded company cultures.

“If you're consuming a natural resource today, it is taking away from a future generation's natural resource and it will at minimum cost them more in the future,” said Ron Gdovic, CEO of the Strip District-based WindStax Energy and co-chair of the new council alongside MacCleary. “That is why it's so important now to really embrace this idea of sustainability at the manufacturing level and be thinking about generations ahead of us.”

The body's 17 founding members span a wide range of company types and sizes — from data security startup eLoop LLC to commercial real estate firm Oxford Development Company to IKEA. Pirates principal owner Bob Nutting is on board, as is CEO of Eat'n Park Hospitality Group Jeff Broadhurst.

“We expect that table to grow,” said Court Gould, executive director of Sustainable Pittsburgh , the nonprofit advocacy group that helped coordinate the council's formation.

The council's purpose is two-fold: First, get more CEOs to join by pledging to meet specific goals and track progress . Second, get the word out to the broader business community that sustainability — or avoiding environmental harm and the depletion of resources — can and should go hand-in-hand with profitability.

Monitoring and lowering electricity consumption, for instance, will reduce utility costs, as will using efficiency and energy-savings solutions. Emitting less pollution will lower the need for future remedies such as pricey cleanups.

What's more, companies may no longer be able to afford putting off becoming environmentally responsible because their stakeholders and investors are demanding it.

More than 80 percent of S&P 500 companies issued corporate sustainability reports last year — up from just 20 percent in 2010, according to surveys by Governance & Accountability Institute Inc .

Such moves are becoming increasingly important to “gain competitive advantages in terms of winning contracts, customers, employees and reputational benefits,” Gdovic said.

“The benefits for long-term financial performance are proven,” he continued, “from better stock valuation and access to capital to market access and revenue growth.”

Particular attention should be paid to communicating these benefits to budding startups, said Bill O'Rourke, a facilitator for the council and Alcoa's former vice president of sustainability, environment, health and safety.

Entrepreneurs often say to themselves, “I've got to get our business going right now; I can't pay attention to that,” O'Rourke said. “But when you have the education, you realize that this is an opportunity to improve everything that's going on in the company — product quality, customer relations, supply relations.”

Tuesday's announcement marked the second occasion in recent months in which a group of regional CEOs expressed a sense of urgency around environmental issues. On Earth Day, 24 nonprofit CEOs convened at the Energy Innovation Center in Uptown to “forestall any back-sliding on the region's progress” amid proposed federal budget cuts and policy shifts

Natasha Lindstrom is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach her at 412-380-8514, nlindstrom@tribweb.com or on Twitter @NewsNatasha.