Happy Anniversary, Green Portfolio Project!!
June 24, 2009 | Posted by Elizabeth Seeger in Partnerships, Private Equity
The partnership between Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co and Environmental Defense Fund is now officially just over a year old. Our announcement of the partnership in May of 2008 laid out our joint vision for improving the environmental and business performance of KKR’s portfolio of companies. We proved the concept with three companies in the pilot project phase. Through this effort, we identified an impressive $16.4 million in savings and reductions of 25,000 metric tons of CO2e, 3,000 tons of paper, and 650 tons of material waste collectively at US Foodservice, Sealy and PRIMEDIA. That was all with low or no-cost investments.
The response to this project has been inspiring. Other private equity firms and their investors are reaching out to EDF for information and guidance. Business school students have sought opportunities to help us. Media outlets as far away as Japan have expressed interest in writing about our efforts. We're not done yet. Our goal is to reach the critical tipping point where improving environmental performance is engrained in how the PE sector does business.
We're getting closer to this point within the KKR portfolio. Just this month, we announced the initiatives of the next set of companies to join the Green Portfolio Project. KKR’s press release on the company initiatives (available on the KKR web site) triggered numerous articles and blogs, including:
We’ll update this information as these companies start setting goals and seeing progress.
What isn’t discussed much, but also deserves attention, is that the three original companies expanded their efforts in 2009. All three are still working on their initial areas of focus, but, because their first steps were so successful in driving environmental and business benefits, have added additional areas of focus or goals. Check out their updated pages at www.edf.org/greenportfolio.
Meanwhile, the KKR/EDF team is already focused on the next phase of companies to participate in the project and the EDF team is working hard to develop our first set of publicly available resources. Stay tuned for that and a discussion on our strategy to transform the rest of the private equity industry, coming soon….
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