Session 11: Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility Continuum

Observation and Experience

Investopedia defined Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as the corporation’s initiatives to assess and take responsibility for the company's effects on environmental and social wellbeing. The term generally applies to efforts that go beyond what may be required by regulators or environmental protection groups. Currently, companies have been including CSR campaigns on their business strategy. Companies are also engaging their employees to different CSR activities such as tree planting, feeding programs, etc. One good example of a company that has a successful and popular CSR campaign is Lamoiyan Corporation. They educate the hearing impaired and hire some of them as their employees.  

As an airline company, we also have a couple of CSR campaigns that aims to mitigate or lessen the negative impact of our operations to the environment, support and help people, and gain reasonable amount of profit. Since our main business is to bring the passengers in different destinations, the commercial department which is my department, had launched the #WhyIFly and #HowIFly campaigns which promotes responsible tourism. A series of videos and photographs that shows the beauty of the Philippines, its diverse culture, and how to take good care of it were posted on our social media websites to promote this campaign. Aside from that, we also have a campaign whose objective is to partner with different social enterprises around the Philippines and help them sell their products by offering it on our inflight merchandise. We also helped them market their products by holding an event where we invited media from Manila, Cebu, and Davao to feature their items on their columns and websites.  We also have the biggest CSR campaign of the company which is #Green24 that aims to educate the people regarding climate change.

Using the Corporate Social Responsibility Continuum, I can say that we already passed the philanthropic stage and are working to incorporate the value of CSR in order to live by our company’s vision and mission. In the Philanthropic stage, the company is doing philanthropic giving which is more than what is required from them. With the projects and activities that I mentioned earlier, our company clearly promotes different CSR advocacies that are gearing towards the welfare of its employees, our passengers, and the environment. We are also incorporating technology in our operations to reduce cost and enhance passenger experience like what we are doing in #Green24 campaign.

Analysis and Reflection

One of our department’s responsibility is to provide food and beverage to our passengers during their flight. The inflight food that we serve is perishable and placed inside an aluminum packaging. Once the meal has been loaded on the aircraft, it must be consumed otherwise it will be considered as waste. The process for the inflight meal service is as follows: a) warehouse personnel loads the meals inside the service trolley and put it inside the aircraft; b) the cabin crew will heat all the meals inside the service trolley; c) the cabin crew will sell the meals inside the service trolley; d) the cabin crew will later collect the rubbish; e) unsold meals and rubbish will be returned to the warehouse.  When I joined the company last 2016, the total inflight meals that we sold in 300,000. In 2017, we were able to double the quantity of meals sold to 650,000 and we are expecting to sell 900,000 meals this 2018. Aside from the sold meals, we also have unsold meals that are automatically considered as waste. For 2017, the total meal waste was 100,000 pieces. The growing number of passengers brought a positive impact on the demand for inflight meals. With this, the waste that we produce form the packaging and amenities such as tissues, utensils, and cups used to consume the food also increases.

According to the International Air Transport Association as reported by CNN (2017), airlines produced 5.2 million tons of waste last 2016 and they are expected to produce 10 million tons annually by 2030. In our case, for inflight meal alone, we produced a lot of waste coming from the unfinished food, aluminum packaging, utensils, tissues, and cups. Most of these wastes are not biodegradable and just end up on the landfill. With the increasing number of passengers, it is expected that the waste that we produce will also grow.

Commitment and Action

To solve the waste problem, we have been controlling the perishable meals loaded on the carts in order to minimize the waste from unsold meals. There is still waste but it somehow decreased. However, because of this controlled meal uplift activity, there were instances where the quantity supplied are not enough to meet the demand for meals from the passengers. Another activity that we have been pushing is waste segregation but due to limited galley space and service time, some flights cannot accommodate this activity.

Aside from that, I have a proposal to improving our current meal uplift formula in order to meet the demand of the passengers and at the same time minimize the waste. I already presented this to my manager and we are positive that this will be successful. I, together with my colleague, are still finalizing some items and we are looking to do a dry run by May and fully implement it on all our flights afterwards.

Aside from that, I also looked for other opportunities that we could explore and found out that some airlines from Europe and United States are already serving their inflight meals placed on a biodegradable and recyclable packaging. Unfortunately, it’s still costly to shift from aluminum packaging to biodegradable and recyclable packaging due to the limited availability of this product. What we can do now is to change the utensils and cups that we are currently using into a recyclable and biodegradable one. Hopefully, in the future our airline would be the first low cost airline in Asia to use sustainable packaging to lessen the wastage coming from the inflight meals.