19
votes
Nespresso's B-Corp Certification raises questions about the legitimacy of the B-Corp rating system
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- Title
- Nespresso: Known for Human Rights Violations, Now B Corp Certified
- Authors
- Anna Canning
- Published
- May 4 2022
- Word count
- 2876 words
There's an awesome video about this from Future Proof:
https://youtu.be/E-lGHWFGjXA&t=0
TLDR: B-Corp is legitimate and tries to do a good thing, but the weights of their criteria are kinda wrong, eg. "having an ethical statement" gives the company the same amount of points as "not using child labour" (the article mentions this as well). They're currently working on a new certification system which should address some of those problems, but they still won't make it too strict because they want to make the certification accessible to big companies to force them to at least do slightly better, instead of only being accessible to small local brands that won't have much impact.
Also, to get the certification, you currently have to score 80 points out of 200. Nespresso scored 84.
I never really found the B-corporation stuff meaningful because it doesn’t actually require the business to have any kind of mechanism to protect it from the owners just deciding they don’t feel like being a B-corporation anymore.
B-corp actually requires you to re-do the certification once every few years
Are there any direct negative consequences for the business if the business owners decide that they are no longer interested in maintaining the certification standards or they decide they don’t want to recertify, other than the fact that they are not allowed to say that they are a B-corporation™️ anymore? if there aren’t any, then I can’t find it to be any kind of meaningful commitment to anything