Socially Responsible Investment Committee

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Current Investment

Process: During the Spring 2023 semester, SRIC identified three companies as potential investment candidates, given the scope of their current issues, and what we as shareholders have the ability to engage with. By investing, we can engage with companies in improving their business practices. We summarized the companies and their issues and took out their names to avoid bias before presenting to the student body for a simple majority vote. Nestle received the majority of student votes, and we used the proceeds from divestment from ExxonMobil to buy a $2,500 share of Nestle. Through this investment, we can support other organizations who engage with Nestle as shareholders, and submit our own shareholder resolutions after holding the share for at least three years—in compliance with the amended SEC law. 

Goal: Although Nestlé closed their sales on several of their bottled water brands, they left a few bottled water brands out of this deal, such as Perrier, S. Pellegrino & Acqua Panna. On their website, they quoted “All of our ‘single serve’ bottles from 8 ounces to 3 liter that are made from non-recycled PET #1 plastic, as well as our 1 gallon and 2.5 gallon bottles made from non-recycled HYDE #2 plastics are completely BPA-free. Additionally, all of our 3-gallon and 5-gallon bottles are made of PET #1, which is BPA-free”. While it may sound substandard that they are using non-recycled materials to produce their bottles, we should keep in mind that only 5% of plastics are recycled in the US due to most other plastics not meeting the threshold to be considered “recyclable”. Current thermomechanical recycling processes have limitations: only clear plastic can be recycled in closed loops, with a loss of quality in each cycle, making it difficult to obtain new products from 100% recycled PET. Thus, complex and soiled plastics are very difficult or impossible to recycle. Good news is that Perrier developed an innovative enzymatic recycling technology that now allows their bottles made from colored PET materials to be 100% recyclable and reusable, optimizing the number of recycling cycles and recyclability of their bottles instead of ending up in landfills. However, such progress has only been seen in Nestlé’s Perrier brand, we hope to push Nestlé to broaden their scope of implementation of this technology to all of its water bottle brands, if not all the plastics used in their production.