HumboldtState University

I am preparing a sustainability report for a company in the wine industry in Northern California.
This includes social reporting as well. I need to use an employee survey to determine employee satisfaction on the many levels of business from salary and benefits to training and career building.

My thesis project will be creating a sustainability report for a company in the wine industry. The wine industry is a dynamic industry with environmental issues relating to agriculture, manufacturing, warehousing, distribution and retail as well as a broad social scope of stakeholders including employees, shareholders, local communities, suppliers and customers. My sustainability report will help move the industry toward a more sustainable future. By normalizing data, creating benchmarks and setting both short and long term goals, I can create a report that makes a company's social and environmental data understandable, measurable and therefore manageable.

My report will be created by doing an onsite evaluation of the company. Previous data on waste streams and energy usage will be scrutinized and normalized. Inputs and outputs will be tracked to eliminate inefficiencies. I will meet with the top executives to define the company's environmental and social goals while revisiting and if necessary recreating their mission statement and vision statement. Working with a hydrology student from the Environmental Resource Engineering program we can do a thorough analysis of water usage to help eliminate any excess usage and contamination. To best understand the social impacts of the company, I will have meetings with the local chamber of commerce and interested NGOs to allow for their input on the social impacts the company has had on local communities. Employee satisfaction surveys are being created with the help of Question Pro data will be analyzed with an Applied Sociology Master's Student. Current data on suppliers will be used to influence future decisions on purchasing. Systems for collecting customer data will be explored as well.

Once all the data has been collected, a sustainability report will be created and submitted to the company for approval. Myself, the school and the company will have copies of the report but only the company will have the right to distribute it without prior approval. If the company desires and is willing to incur the costs, I will arrange to submit the report to CERES (Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economics) for certification and publication.