Lockheed Martin is rewarded for rewarding others, while Aetna is found to have shorted health-insurance claims

GOOD
Get a whiff of this! Cadbury earns a profit propeller for agreeing to cut carbon emissions by reducing…cow burps. Around 20 percent of our planet’s greenhouse-gas emissions come from cow “emissions” —so much so that a single cow reportedly has the same annual methane emissions as that of an average family car. Cadbury has decided to tackle this challenge head on and encourage cows to burp less in order to reduce the carbon footprint of the company’s chocolate products. Cadbury is hoping to cut down on this number by encouraging its dairy farmer suppliers to change the dietary habits of the cattle that they raise. According to one study on the subject, the dietary changes could reduce up to 50 percent emissions per year.

Online auction site eBay receives an eco-friendly profit propeller for its “Green Team,” which started as a grassroots movement by a handful of employees and has now expanded throughout the company and extended to the broader eBay community. The initiative raises awareness of shopping with an environmental conscience. You can join the Green Team by going to its website, www.ebaygreenteam.com. According to the group’s website, the Green Team will host discussions, let you know about events in your area and send updates on the Green Team’s collective impact. (This profit propeller was recommended by reader Amyn Thawer)

We’re rewarding Lockheed Martin for rewarding others and issuing a profit propeller to the company for publicizing its 2009 Chairman’s Award, presented annually by Chairman, President and CEO Robert J. Stevens to two employees who best exemplify the corporation’s commitment to ethics and integrity. The two individuals that earned the 2009 award were Candace Davis and Joyce Lambert, both honored for identifying and correcting a discrepancy between labor rates specified in a government contract awarded to Lockheed and rates the corporation had submitted in its final offer, according to Lockheed Martin. By discovering the discrepancy, Davis and Lambert avoided overbilling the U.S. Government by more than $2 million. The fact that Lockheed Martin actually publicized the award through the media is the right step toward encouraging corporate responsibility throughout the company.

BAD
We’re hoping Spansion, a company that provides Flash memory, won’t forget about its new paper bag for restoring full executive pay while simultaneously cutting 35 percent of its workforce—this comes out to about 3,000 jobs. Last October, the company implemented a 10 percent pay cut for top executives, but announced that they would be receiving full pay again early this year. With all the news surrounding the bad economy and declining job market, we’re hoping that companies start realizing sooner than later that these policies are neither acceptable nor unnoticeable.

UBS can hide behind a brand new paper bag after the company allegedly hid 52,000 American customer accounts from U.S. authorities. Another less than stellar idea amidst a very large financial decline. The Department of Justice filed a suit against UBS, attempting to force the company to disclose who owns accounts that hold nearly $15 billion in assets, according to the Financial Times. The bank said in a statement that it will be challenging the suit.

A cheap paper bag goes to Aetna after a probe by the office of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo found that the company underpaid over $5 million in student health-insurance claims nationwide between 1998 and April 2008, according to a statement by Cuomo’s office. The company agreed to pay over $5 million to reimburse college students for allegedly underpaying the students’ out-of-network health insurance costs. The agreement covers over 73,000 students at over 200 colleges and universities across the United States.

Do you have an example of a recent news story that you think should be awarded either a Profit Propeller or a Paper Bag in Ethisphere? Send your ideas to Stefan Linssen at slinssen@ethisphere.org.

Profit Propellers are awarded to companies and organizations that have recently done something interesting, innovative or brave in the area of ethical leadership.

Paper Bags are bestowed upon companies and organizations that are involved in or have attempted to cover up scandals, violations or other embarrassing events.