Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability at Emirates Airline

This report delves into the corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability practices of Emirates Airline, a leading flight service. It examines how Emirates integrates sustainability into its business operations, aligning with Wayne Visser's concept of CSR 2.0. The report highlights Emirates' initiatives, including waste recycling, fuel efficiency, emission reduction, and inclusive practices like gender balance and accessibility. It emphasizes the airline's efforts to reduce its carbon footprint, conserve resources, and adopt green building principles. The report also discusses Emirates' use of technology, such as real-time data analysis and the 'Emvironment' program, to achieve its sustainability goals. While acknowledging areas for improvement, such as the energy consumption of airports, the report underscores Emirates' commitment to collaborative, performance-driven, and diversified CSR strategies to ensure long-term sustainability and address global environmental concerns.

Running head: CSR AND SUSTAINBILITY OF EMIRATES AIRLINE
CSR AND SUSTAINABLITY OF EMIRATES AIRLINE
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The report aims to delve into the sustainable practices of the gold star business called
Emirates Airline which is a leading flight service. The report depicts the concept of corporate
social responsibility as discussed by Wayne Visser (2017) in his book “The Age of
Responsibility” covering how the business have integrated sustainability in their business
activities as their foremost responsibility to ensure a healthy, clean environment and propagating
the same idea through advanced information and communication technologies and social media
platforms (Mansour, 2017). These cost effective media platforms have enabled the business to
promote their CSR activities efficiently with ease.
Corporate Social Responsibility is a process to adopt sustainable business management
practices in order to achieve the goals and objectives of the company in sustainable manner.
Emirates Airline is an airline service providing commercial air transportation services as well as
passenger services to more than 120 destinations across the globe. The business aims to adhere to
sustainable practices like recycling of wastes, controlling wastage, efficient power methods and
adopting inclusive practices like hiring of female employees to strike a gender balance. This
global giant aims to make the whole infrastructure disable friendly by making the infrastructure
accessible to all people (Squalli, 2014). The other foremost priority of the business is reduce the
emissions thereby reducing the carbon footprint. Rising temperature, global warming, climate
change and other environmental concerns plaguing the nations globally calls for the sustainable
practices for better management and judicious use of scarce resources. The lack of potable water
and excessive use of water airline calls for conservation of these non- renewable resources.
Sustainable practices allow the companies to align themselves with the modern dynamic
environment. The single largest expenditure is consumed in the jet fuel hence it becomes

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imperative for the company to achieve fuel efficiency in its airline services by becoming 80%
fuel efficient which means that the airline will fly more yet consume lesser fuel thus saving a
huge amount of fossil fuels. A Fuel Optimization working group to look into the flight operations
in order to find potential fuel saving opportunities. This indicates that the business is moving
towards the goals of sustainability adequately while thinking about the global issues, it integrated
a localized effort and channelizing its CSR through creativity, glocality, scalability and
responsiveness. It makes use of real time data, payloads, and data on fuel consumption, emission
data and find appropriate flight destinations to manage the whole process.
The company started “Emvironment” program to create environmental champions
within the organization to work towards conservation of resources. It also aims to create
passionate group of environmentalist to work towards attainment of the environmental
objectives. The company also works strategically to control noise pollution caused by the airline
with improvised aircraft design and infrastructure to reduce the noise pollution and its harmful
impact on the society as a whole ("Emirates Group releases 2016/17 Annual Environmental
Report", 2018). The weight of the aircraft is also redesigned minimize noise pollution. There is
focused group called IFS Team where the meal of the economy class is redesigned to in order to
reduce food waste, include more biodegradable items so as to reduce the carbon footprint. The
recyclable products are used, further, the aluminum cans have been recycled for several years. A
waste segregation team segregates the waste to collect all the wastes which can be recycled, thus,
the company has integrated a wide spectrum of sustainable practices so as to bring optimization
of the limited resources and save huge amount of financials costs. The company also provides
huge facilities for accommodation, reduce electricity consumption (Visser & Tolhurst, 2017).
Green building principles are foundation to its infrastructural facilities like efficient rain water

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harvesting, solar power facilities as well as move towards zero emissions on a regular basis
(Visser, 2011). This have made the flight service compatible to latest sustainable practices which
is necessary to provide a quality life and better living standards. Extensive use of solar energy for
like solar pumps have replaced the diesel pumps, further automated system of drip irrigation as a
part of corporate social responsibility in remote locations such as Tanzania and Brazil. Rainwater
harvesting projects, LED lighting, community development projects and assistance to the
villagers with vocational trainings to create a special taskforce to construct water tanks so as to
provide clean potable water so as to reinforce a better access to health and hygiene. For a
sustainable future the company invests a huge amount of resources in the newer technologies,
digitization of the services so as to increase efficiency in every manner. Many technological
improvements has roped in to become efficient in every manner (Visser & Kymal, 2015). All
these efforts are taken by Emirates to achieve sustainability at all levels. Emirates airline aims to
attain sustainability in every way however, it lacks to fulfill its objectives in a phased manner.
The airport consumes massive amount of energy derived from fossil fuels which can be changed
to renewable sources of energy. Many airports in the south east nations have become a complete
zero emissions by devolving technologies like solar powered light systems to conserve energy.
Corporate social responsibility is an enormous concept which aims to be inclusive in
every aspect so as ensure equitable resources and become sustainable in the long run. This
enables the business to expand and become more responsive to adopt creative solutions. Emirates
have been quite successful in maintaining its operations worldwide and simultaneously applying
glocality in resolving the emerging concerns and issues more promptly. According to Visser
(2017), CSR 2.0 aims to be more collaborative, performance driven, reward based, diversified,
integrated and operate on certain scale. Emirates Airline have been exemplary in achieving its

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CSR objectives and have adhered to all levels of CSR 2.0 as it has been collaborating with
people from all sectors to become fuel efficient thereby reducing its carbon footprint
considerably. Further, every activity is performance driven as levels of CO2 emissions are
measured and controlled accordingly. The aircraft models are also designed to reduce noise
pollution. Hence, the overall effort of the business is to become sustainable in the long term.

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References
Emirates Group releases 2016/17 Annual Environmental Report. (2018). Retrieved from
https://www.emirates.com/media-centre/copy-emirates-group-releases-201617-annual-
environmental-report
Mansour, S. (2017, August). Global Studies About the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
In International Conference on Knowledge Management in Organizations (pp. 203-213).
Springer, Cham.
Squalli, J. (2014). Airline passenger traffic openness and the performance of Emirates
Airline. The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 54(1), 138-145.
Visser, W. (2011). The age of responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the new DNA of business. John Wiley
& Sons.
Visser, W. (2017). Sustainable frontiers: Unlocking change through business, leadership and
innovation. Routledge.
Visser, W. (2017). Sustainable frontiers: Unlocking change through business, leadership and
innovation. Routledge.
Visser, W., & Kymal, C. (2015). Integrated value creation (IVC): beyond corporate social
responsibility (CSR) and creating shared value (CSV). Journal of International Business
Ethics, 8(1), 29-43.
Visser, W., & Tolhurst, N. (2017). The world guide to CSR: A country-by-country analysis of
corporate sustainability and responsibility. Routledge.