Latest news with #Responsibility
Fibre2Fashion
3 days ago
- Business
- Fibre2Fashion
US' INDA unveils conference programme for WOW 2025
INDA, the association of the nonwoven fabrics industry, has announced the release of the full conference programme for the World of Wipes (WOW) International Conference, taking place July 21–24, 2025, in Ohio. This year's theme, 'Wipe to Win: Innovating for a Sustainable and Profitable Future,' will bring together industry leaders to address pressing challenges and opportunities across the wipes value chain. Programme topics will include US manufacturing threats, tariff and regulatory impacts, fibre sustainability, consumer perceptions, fragrance trends, slitting advancements, plastic-free wipe innovations, sports hygiene, and flushability, INDA said on its website. INDA has released the full programme for the 2025 World of Wipes (WOW) Conference, set for July 21â€'24 in Ohio. Under the theme 'Wipe to Win', the event will explore US manufacturing challenges, tariffs, sustainability, consumer trends, plastic-free innovations, and more. Highlights include expert panels and sessions on eco-friendly wipes, fragrance trends, and market shifts. The upcoming conference will feature a dynamic lineup of sessions addressing the latest challenges and innovations in manufacturing and the wipes industry. Highlights include panel discussions such as Navigating the Headwinds: US Manufacturing Threats & Challenges in 2025 and 'The Great Regulatory and Tariff Pow-WOW. Other sessions explore sustainability and consumer trends, with topics like From Forest to Flush: Sustainability and Responsibility in Fibre and Wipes, Trends, Tushes & TikToks: The Rise of the Modern Wipe, and No Plastic, No Problem: The Next Generation of Eco-Wise Wipes. Additional engaging sessions include Sniff, Save, Slice: Rethinking Wipes from Fragrance to Finish and Swipe Right: The New Faces of Specialty Wipes, offering attendees insights into both environmental responsibility and market evolution. Fibre2Fashion News Desk (RR)
Associated Press
5 days ago
- Business
- Associated Press
AllianceBernstein: Materiality Matters - The ESG Factors That Count
Patrick O'Connell, CFA | Director—Responsible Investing Portfolio Solutions and Research John Huang, CFA | Director of Responsible Investments, Data and Technology—Responsibility Erin Bigley, CFA | Chief Responsibility Officer The materiality of ESG factors differs across sectors and markets. Investors need to understand how. As environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors help contribute to—or detract from—security returns, it makes sense for active investors to integrate them into security selection. But there's a wide disparity in the materiality of ESG factors across investment sectors and markets. In our view, understanding this dynamic is the key to successfully incorporating ESG risks and opportunities into portfolio construction. For many investors, whether fixed income or equity, the process of integrating ESG factors into their strategies begins with correlating the relevance of each factor to individual industries. At a basic level this shows, for example, that greenhouse gas emissions are a particular risk for mining companies and electric utilities, while customer privacy is a key concern for the healthcare sector. This is a good starting point but offers an incomplete perspective. We believe a much deeper dive is necessary to fully dimension the materiality of ESG factors for portfolio performance. Investors need to know how a particular factor may affect investment returns for a given sector or market. Factors Can Have Wide or Narrow Impacts Factor attribution using historical returns can reveal how ESG factors have contributed to investment returns in the past, whether for a sector or an entire investment universe, in equities or in bonds. We've observed that some factors can be financially material for all companies in a market, regardless of sector. For example, we divided stocks in the MSCI All Country World Index into quintiles according to their total recordable incident rate (TRIR)—the number of workplace injuries or illnesses—then compared their returns relative to the parent index over 14 years. The results show that high TRIR consistently underperformed the market and that low TRIR consistently outperformed. Similarly, in the bond market, 'social fines' is a powerful, index-wide factor. Social fines are regulatory penalties imposed for nonenvironmental reasons, such as workplace health and safety and anticompetitive practices. Other ESG factors with broad relevance across investment sectors include CEOs' length of tenure and employee turnover. For investors wishing to integrate ESG factors into their portfolios, it's useful, in our view, to know which factors have index-wide applicability. Factor attribution can also reveal which ESG factors are particularly relevant to a specific sector and which have historically shown no financial materiality. Another advantage of factor attribution is that it can lead to observations that are unexpected and even counterintuitive. We found, for example, that companies with high ESG disclosures broadly performed better than those with low or no disclosures, regardless of whether their ESG practices were good, bad or indifferent. In the case of ESG metrics where there was no significant under- or overperformance relative to the market—CFO tenure and split roles for CEO and chair of the board—companies that disclosed data outperformed companies that didn't disclose, on average. Fundamental Research Enhances Insights from Factor Attribution But factor attribution alone is not enough, in our view; it should complement fundamental research. Understanding the effect of ESG factors on performance is most valuable in the context of broader research into how well a company is managed. For example, fundamental research can show that a high TRIR affects productivity directly, through lost working hours, and indirectly, by creating a culture in which workers are undermotivated because they don't feel safe. Additionally, factor attribution works best with long data series, which are not always available, stressing the importance of fundamental research. Another way fundamental research can help is in measuring ESG factors appropriately to a particular sector, instead of taking the generic approach typically used by many third-party ESG databases. This could mean, for example, measuring carbon emissions in terms of miles per gallon for automakers, per passenger mile for airliners and per ton of cement produced for building-material companies. And it can tease out the nuances underlying many ESG factors. In the case of the mining sector, for example, fundamental research can focus on tailings dam risk within the more broadly defined factors of water and hazardous materials management. As this small snapshot of an ESG materiality matrix shows, these insights can be mapped very simply. But it's the quality of the information behind it that gives the map its value: the understanding of how ESG factors can be financially material across investment sectors, industries and markets. By embedding such knowledge in their securities research and portfolio construction, investors, in our view, may significantly enhance the potential for outperformance. The authors wish to thank Peter Højsteen-Ljungbeck for his contribution. The views expressed herein do not constitute research, investment advice or trade recommendations and do not necessarily represent the views of all AB portfolio-management teams. Views are subject to revision over time. MSCI makes no express or implied warranties or representations, and shall have no liability whatsoever with respect to any MSCI data contained MSCI data may not be further redistributed or used as a basis for other indices or any securities or financial products. This report is not approved, reviewed or produced by MSCI. Learn more about AB's approach to responsibility here. Visit 3BL Media to see more multimedia and stories from AllianceBernstein
E&E News
14-05-2025
- Politics
- E&E News
Group claims EPA bars environmental justice staff from other jobs
The Trump administration is illegally blocking employees in EPA's environmental justice program from seeking jobs elsewhere in the agency, a worker advocacy group alleges. At issue are staffers who were forced to take paid leave in a prelude to their potential firing as part of President Donald Trump's governmentwide crusade against programs purportedly tied to 'diversity, equity and inclusion.' 'Our understanding is that employees on administrative leave are denied access to email (where positions are often advertised internally) and hiring systems such as Talent Hub where open position descriptions are posted and through which candidates may apply,' Laura Dumais, staff counsel for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, told EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in a letter last week. Advertisement The lockout violates a variety of requirements embedded in federal law, Dumais added, including the right to compete for employment and a ban on discrimination 'on the basis of non-performance-related factors.' She asked EPA to immediately grant all idled staff access to its email system and to Talent Hub.
The Independent
12-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Richard von Weizsäcker: Germany's President who served in Hitler's army but later promoted tolerance and became his country's conscience
Richard von Weizsäcker was a former soldier in Hitler's army who used his largely ceremonial office as president of Germany to denounce his country's Nazi past and to condemn intolerance toward immigrants and other minorities. Von Weizsäcker was elected president of West Germany in 1984 and held the office as the country's formal head of state for 10 years. During that time he helped oversee reunification with East Germany in 1990. In the German parliamentary system, the Chancellor is the head of government and exercises more authority over the policies of the government than the President (Helmut Kohl was Germany's Chancellor throughout von Weizsäcker's tenure as president). But the aristocratic, white-haired von Weizsäcker became, perhaps, the most country's popular political figure. He was, in essence, his country's chief ambassador and used his presidential office as a platform to promote important matters of national and moral principle. In an address to the Bundestag, the German parliament, on 8 May 1985 – the 40th anniversary of Germany's surrender at the end of the Second World War – von Weizsäcker directed a cleansing spotlight on the country's greatest shame when he challenged his compatriots to take responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. He dismissed the commonly held notion that ordinary German citizens were not aware of the actions of the Nazi regime. "There were many ways of not burdening one's conscience, of shunning responsibility, looking away, keeping mum," he said. "When the unspeakable truth of the Holocaust then became known at the end of the war, all too many of us claimed they had not known anything about it or even suspected anything. Who could remain unsuspecting after the burning of the synagogues, the plundering, the stigmatisation of the Star of David, the deprivation of rights, the ceaseless violation of human dignity?" Von Weizsäcker, who spent seven years as an infantry officer during the war, was a potent symbol of national reflection and reconciliation. "Anyone who closes his eyes to the past," he said, "is blind to the present." He called on Germans to view 8 May not as a day of national surrender but as, he suggested, "a day of liberation. It freed us all from the system of National Socialist tyranny." Von Weizsäcker's forthright speech echoed around the world, and he was hailed as his country's moral conscience. He travelled to Israel in 1985, attended the German premiere of the film Schindler's List with the Israeli ambassador and in 1993 visited the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. "President Weizsäcker has had a major, positive influence in enhancing Germany's role and reputation on the world stage," the US ambassador to Germany, Richard Holbrooke, said in 1994. He repeatedly spoke out against intolerance toward immigrants and other minorities and attended memorial services for Turkish victims of neo-Nazi violence. He also took a leading role in preparing Germany for reunification. As mayor of West Berlin in the early 1980s he had been the first leader from the democratic western part of the country to cross the border and conduct talks with his counterparts in communist-controlled East Berlin. Throughout the 1990s he travelled extensively round eastern Europe, assuring his country's neighbours that Germany was no longer, as he put it, "haunted by Teutonic dreams of national power". As early as 1985 he had urged Germans on both sides of the divide to think of themselves as one nation, and he was among the first leaders to call for the national capital to return to Berlin. During a four-day state visit to Britain in 1986, he addressed a joint session of the Houses of Parliament, the first German to be accorded that honour. Richard Karl von Weizsäcker was born in 1920 in his family's castle in Stuttgart. He was from an aristocratic family of statesmen, theologians and scholars and had the inherited title of Freiherr, or Baron. His father Ernst was a senior official in the Nazi foreign ministry and served as German ambassador to the Vatican. An older brother, Carl Friedrich, was part of a team of German scientists that tried unsuccessfully to develop a nuclear bomb during the Second World War. Von Weizsäcker studied at Oxford and the University of Grenoble, his time in England highlighting in his mind the difference between a fully-functioning democracy and the authoritarian regime he had left behind. He joined the German army in 1938 and took part in the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Two days later his older brother Heinrich was killed in battle, which deeply affected von Weizsäcker's view of the war. Stationed on the eastern front in Russia in 1943, von Weizsäcker later recalled, he and other German officers shot holes in a portrait of Hitler, and several of his friends took part in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. After the war von Weizsäcker studied law at the University of Göttingen and when his father was charged with sending French Jews to Auschwitz he joined his defence team during the Nuremberg trials. His father was sentenced to seven years' jail, which was later reduced to five, and was released in 1950; Winston Churchill had described his sentence as "a deadly error". Richard received a doctorate in law and worked for the Mannesmann steel conglomerate before being elected to parliament in 1969; he was mayor of West Berlin from 1981 to 1984. He wrote several books about history and politics in which he advocated a moderate, centrist approach for Germany as it entered the 21st century. When he left the presidency in 1994, he reflected on the powerful speech he had delivered nine years earlier, in which he asked Germans to own up to the legacy of the Holocaust. "I wouldn't take back a single word of that speech today," he said. µ MATT SCHUDEL Richard Karl von Weizsäcker, soldier, lawyer, politician and statesman: born Stuttgart 15 April 1920; married Marianne von Kretschmann (three children); died 31 January 2015.
The Hindu
25-04-2025
- Health
- The Hindu
New equipment commissioned at Tiruchi GH
District Collector M. Pradeep Kumar inaugurated new equipment worth ₹98.40 lakh at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Government Hospital (MGMGH) in Tiruchi on Friday. In an official release, hospital authorities said that the new tools were an echocardiogram (ECG) with adult, paediatric and neonatal probe; a pulsed electro-magnetic stimulation therapy device, and a combined ultrasonic therapy tool for all types of pain. The machines are sponsored by the Corporate Social Responsibility funds of Central Warehousing Corporation (CWC), Chennai The new equipment would be useful in treating cardiac patients, newborns and mothers, and augment the healing of fractures, besides aiding pain relief, said the release. At present, the Cardiology department receives at least 200 patients for ECG services. The instruments were launched by the Collector in the presence of Jacintha Lawrence, CWC executive director (South), S. Kumarvel, Dean, K.A.P.V. Government Medical College, MGMGH medical superintendent Udhaya Aruna and deputy superintendent Arun Raj.
