Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Today’s Company of the Day is DuPont.

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Almost from the moment Eleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours founded it in 1802, the company we call DuPont has been a force in the world of chemicals. Chemical makers have gotten a bad environmental reputation in recent decades, especially since Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking 1962 book Silent Spring raised public alarm over the effects of chemical pesticides in natural ecosystems. Large chemical companies like DuPont came under further scrutiny over the next couple of decades as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act went into effect, as as the Superfund program stuck them with large bills for cleaning up toxic spills.

Since the early 1990s, though, DuPont has taken major steps to remake itself as a leader in environmentally friendly business practices. Its Web site points to DuPont’s many successes in beating its own targets for energy efficiency and environmental footprint reduction. Among other things, the company has reduced its own greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 60% from 1990 levels, and has capped its energy use at 1990 levels. It has also committed to several ambitious goals for 2015, including at least $2 billion in annual revenues from products that enable greater energy efficiency or greenhouse-gas reductions for customers, and at least $8 billion in annual revenues from products derived from non-depletable resources. (This last point is especially significant when you consider how much of our modern menu of industrial chemicals come from non-renewable petroleum.)

All of these moves are part of DuPont CEO Chad Holliday’s larger plan to keep DuPont at the forefront of corporate environmental responsibility. The project allows the company to succeed on two fronts at once — first by cutting waste, saving money, and boosting DuPont’s bottom line, and second by cultivating public and commercial goodwill for a company that might otherwise be regarded as a big, bad polluter, rather than a surprising standard-bearer for the green movement in Big Business.

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