The Environmental Impact of Tobacco Industry. Philip Morris International: a Case Study.

The last years have seen a constant and continuous effort put in place by PMI in order to deliver sustainability initiatives which could encompass the different stages of production. However, 2018 was a crucial year for the company, which decided to adopt a holistic approach to the issue, rather than keeping launching several unrelated campaigns. The outcome of this process was ground-breaking and resulted in the definition of a comprehensive strategy, which relied on a constructive dialogue with external stakeholders in order to gather as much information as possible and set a complete list of priorities and strategies to fulfil them.
This procedure was carried out through four interconnected steps. In the initial phase, the company tried to spot the areas which needed more attention, creating a draft which included 24 potentially relevant topics. Once the list was completed, interviews were scheduled with roughly 150 stakeholders, both internal and external. Some of these contacts were managed through online surveys, which the respondents could fill in at their convenience. This round of discussion turned out to be particularly useful, since it allowed the proposed list to be enriched with other relevant aspects concerning the company’s commitment to sustainability, such as raw material and other supplies. The inputs gathered so far were then merged in the creation of a sustainability materiality matrix: this passage was pivotal in the definition of the company’s priorities, which were organized into three tiers, according to the urgency needed for them to be addressed. Subsequently, the matrix was improved through the definition of the four pillars of the sustainability strategy, namely: business transformation, operational excellence, social impact management and environmental footprint reduction. Due to practical constraints, this paper will discuss only the pillars which are directly related to the main focus of the study, i.e. the last two of them. However, a comprehensive review of the other parameters is available on PMI’s website.
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The definition of this commitment affected the structure of PMI, which appointed also a Chief Sustainability Office, whose task is that of monitoring the coherence and the effectiveness of the actions taken by the company. At the same time, also the Board of Directors and the Senior Management team engage with sustainability practises.
In addition to that, it can be assumed that PMI’s interest in reducing its impact on the environment is characterized by a future-looking engagement and attention to potential future behaviour. Indeed, as declared by the company in the Sustainability Report 2018, they seek to minimize (our) impact on the environment as well as to understand and adapt to potential future business impacts of major environmental trends.