The Social Responsibility Journey of the Canadian's Peat Moss Industry

Social and environmental concerns have become increasingly influential in consumers’ purchasing decisions and critical to ensure companies’ and industries’ social license to operate. This increased awareness may quickly destroy the reputation of any business perceived to be behaving unethically – but also entails an opportunity to engage in positive change and enhance stakeholder understanding and collaboration to ensure lasting economic growth. And this is what achieved the Association des producteurs de tourbe horticole du Québec (APTHQ) and the Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association (CSPMA) by developing their first industry social responsibility (ISR) report.

This communication is about the associations’ social responsibility journey leading to this publication and its outcomes for the industry. Specifically, it relates how the APTHQ and the CSPMA transformed environmental challenges into market opportunities while creating a culture of continuous improvement by doing and saying the right things.

Developed as part of the Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture Systems (SAFA) pilot project of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), this report capitalized on the past achievements of the associations in the field of sustainability to provide the industry with a benchmark for sustainable accounting on its governance, social, environmental and economic impacts. In particular, the associations used the SAFA guidelines to structure and organize in a coherent and systematic way the results from existing initiatives or reports, such as the social and environmental life cycle assessments (LCA), certification standards (Veriflora®) and the annual reports. In order to identify and prioritize peat moss sustainable issues and define objectives to meet them, a stakeholder consultation involving consumers, environmentalist groups, local community organization representatives, peat moss producers and representatives from the industry’s associations was also conducted. In the end, the report was third party reviewed to reinforce its credibility.

This first report, published in 2014, facilitated communication to various stakeholders on the sector’s sustainability efforts as well as the sector’s upcoming commitments to be undertaken in preparation to the next publication in 2017. The associations already undertook in 2016 to update the industry’s social, economic, environmental and governance profile by conducting a survey amongst its members. This new information will be used by the associations and their members to compare their performance, identify new areas for improvements and engage in constructive dialogue with their stakeholders in order to remain a sustainable practices leader in the production of sphagnum peat moss products and a model for its social responsibility practices.