In 1999, the Danish company Dandy commissioned a chewing gum plant in the town of Veliky Novgorod, which became known as the Dirol plant. In 2002, Dandy’s European operations acquired the Cadbury Schweppes international candy maker. Assuming management of the Dirol plant, Cadbury Schweppes discovered that the enterprise was weighed down with the inheritance of poor plant relations with Veliky Novgorod residents, who viewed the plant as extremely harmful to both their health and the environment. Negative sentiments ran especially high in the Torgovaya District, which the plant neighbored on the outskirts of town.
The plant’s transfer under Cadbury Schweppes’ management coincided with a severe deterioration of the conflict. It was the new owners who had to absorb the main consequences of the population’s pent-up fury, which was expressed in a wave of complaints to various authorities, antagonism from the local elite, and media criticism. According to preliminary social survey results, the Dirol plant was identified as the region’s worst environmental polluter by 42 percent of Veliky Novgorod residents. Sixteen percent called it the most damaging enterprise to their health. These public sentiments do not correspond to the actual state of affairs, since the Dirol plant’s "contribution" to environmental pollution – which stood at 27 tons of pollutants per year – comprised just 0.088 percent of the total volume of pollutants released into the city’s atmosphere by the city’s other enterprises and transportation.
The reasons for conflict involved mistrust in a "foreign" company, the absence of public information, and the local residents’ irrational thinking. For example, members of the project’s working group heard professors of Veliky Novgorod University say things such as "We had to build in an oncological center because of the plant!" They were referring to a center that was commissioned three years prior to the plant’s appearance in the city. Finally, an important factor involved the smell emitted by the plant’s aromatic components: the plant’s environmental conservation equipment fully corresponded to existing regulations, but did not provide for the suppression of aromatic substance emissions, which were released into the atmosphere in very low concentrations (the annual aromatic substance emissions per resident living in the exposure zone corresponded to the aromatic components contained in a 100-gram bottle of perfume). However, since they are directly intended to carry a "strong smell", these substances are detected by humans in concentrates of just a few molecules per a cubic meter of air. This truly did pose a real inconvenience to residents of the exposure zone, even through these components were in no way harmful to people’s health. Moreover, the organization of the plant’s communications was inadequate for the situation: the head office’s location in Moscow meant that information had to be received there as well.
This was critical for the local media and deprived local residents of the opportunity to make direct contact with the plant, or to receive direct feedback. Furthermore, the central office did not even have a media relations department or a PR service. This, in turn, predetermined the company’s passive public position – its lack of resources meant that company communications were reduced to simply “reacting” to events, without being able to take professional stock of the particularities its operations in the region involved.
The agency suggested that the company fully take upon itself the task of informing the general public. The core component of the decision consists of letters to the residents of the exposure zones. The company adopted a program to correct the situation with regard to the aromatic emissions by creating an additional filter system. The creation of the system was the largest one-time investment project in the area of environmental protection in Russia ever undertaken by a foreign company. The cost of creating the system was more than $1m, plus expenditures on regular replacement of absorption filters costing more than $100,000 per year.
During the entire cycle of regular announcements on behalf of the company’s production director I.S. Blinov, the general public was directly informed about the company’s position, about progress in creating a filtration system and the real composition of the emissions. In particular, a special brochure was published and sent to residents of the exposure zone that fully disclosed the composition of the factory’s emissions and contained the findings of more than ten expert examinations confirming the factory’s safety and other detailed information.
The key messages to the general public included an acknowledgment that the company had caused inconvenience to the residents (while clearly denying harm to health), its readiness to take real measures to eliminate these inconveniences, the company’s international responsibility for adhering to ecological safety norms in the area included in the UNESCO world heritage fund and clear testimony that the factory had not significantly affected the ecological situation. For example, the simplest calculations showed that 1) road transport alone in Novgorod emits as much carbon monoxide as more than 2000 Dirol factories would, 2) the chrome oxide emitted every year by the factory would chrome a surface no larger than a driver license photo, 3) the daily emissions of the Dirol factory causes each resident of the exposure zone to ingest from 0.02% to 0.000012% of the content of aluminum, iron, manganese, copper, nickel, chrome and sulfate that he/she ingests from ordinary drinking water straight from the tap. Similar comparisons were found for all 26 of the substances emitted by the factory into the atmosphere.
The factory’s production process was also presented. It was important to change the public’s perception oft the facility being a chemical factory. But rather, that it is a candy factory, and the production of chewing gum lies somewhere between candy and toothpaste.
The letters, grouped into 4 distribution "waves", were sent to 10,000 addresses each, and a feedback system was set up. It included a post office box for letters from the general public to the company and a number of virtual "town meetings" with the factory’s management organized jointly with local media, including the use of the Internet. The dates of the events were announced in open letters to city residents.
The result: a precedent-setting project of international significance. It was the first time that a foreign company in Russia invested more than $1m in the creation of an environmental protection system over and above the regulatory requirements for the sake of its reputation. In 2003-2005 the agency tracked more than 50 local ecological conflicts "with the participation of foreign capital". There wasn’t a single case in which companies took practical measures to increase the protection level over and above the regulatory requirements.
In the eyes of the general public, the Dirol factory became the absolute leader among local companies in terms of activity and effectiveness in reducing negative impact on the environment. A repeat survey of the general public showed that 29% of respondents in the city confirm this (38% in the district where the problem occurred) against 9.8% for the second-ranked company. The technical effectiveness of the mailing (confirmation that the information had been obtained from the company) was 98%. Moreover, more than 50% of the residents who had received the information from the company stated that their opinion about the factory had improved. The restoration of the public’s trust also helped to strengthen relations with the local government. Today the company is armed with arguments that are sufficient to confirm its social responsibility so that the government, for its part, has adopted these arguments and come to the company’s defense against backbiting and baseless complaints.
The media of Novgorod Region have also changed their attitude toward the company. During the project implementation period, more than 60% of the releases were positive in relation to the Dirol factory and the company mentioned in them versus 2% negative. For Novgorod Region as a whole, releases on the appropriate theme provoked 4.8m piece of feedback through the media, of which about 85% were positive in relation to the Dirol factory and the company mentioned in them versus only 0.5% negative. None of the releases were “made to order”.
In 2007 the factory opened a new production line. Despite an increase in capacity, the factory’s emissions were reduced from 27 to 20 metric tons per year through the installation of the filtration system. Public hearings preceding the project confirmed the positive attitudes of city residents to the factory.
The media-relations aspects of the project were completed with the help of Rakurs-PR Agency, on whose behalf the project was submitted for consideration for the national Silver Archer prize in the sphere of the development of public relations, which it won in January 2006.
